This Week in Startups - Inbound vs. outbound deal flow (VC School) + Jason Jacobs of My Climate Journey | E1425

Episode Date: April 3, 2022

Sunday double-header! In the opening VC Sunday School segment, Jason discusses deal flow (1:43), you will learn: 1. Inbound vs. outbound deal flow 2. Tactics VCs use to streamline their deal flow  3. Jason's philosophy on responding to founders - Your process is my opportunity  Then, Molly chats with Jason Jacobs of My Climate Journey about scaling climate tech investing, inspiring people to solve climate problems and the tangible value of community (21:27).  (00:00) Jason and Molly introduce the show (01:43) VCSS: Inbound/outbound deal flow in VC (11:30) Rocket - Go to http://getrocket.com/twist and use promo code TWIST for 20% off your first placement. (12:42) Introductions and double opt-in tactics (19:16) Introducing the This Week in Climate Startups segment (20:10) Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist (21:27) TWiCS w/Jason Jacobs of My Climate Journey (30:19) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (32:32) “Climate touches everything” (39:13) When did the community and content become capital? (49:48) How Jason Jacobs invests (57:14) The Climate Startup Jason wished existed Check out My Climate Journey: https://www.mcjcollective.com/ FOLLOW Jason Jacobs: https://twitter.com/jjacobs22 FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, it is Sunday, meaning it's this weekend climate startups. But first, another edition of VC Sunday School. Molly Wood is wrapping up her first quarter, her first 90 days as an investor. And as we go into the second quarter, she's got a bunch of deals that she's pursuing, and we're starting to close some deals in the climate space. But we're going to talk about what comes before you close a deal, which is deal flow, both inbound people emailing you as an investor and then hunting the outbound where the magic happens. And then I interview who,

I'm calling the Pied Piper of Climate Tech. I'm so excited about this. I've been listening to him forever. Jason Jacobs of My Climate Journey. It is an awesome, whirlwind of an interview. And it's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by

Rocket. To hire in today's competitive market, you need outstanding recruiting. Rocket's expert recruiters paired with ML candidate matching, set them apart from the rest. Get 20% off your first placement at Get Rocket, dot com slash twist. Embroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance

at a lower cost with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at inbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And open phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back. But using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't. in one of them. Openphone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months.

Hey everybody. It's time for everybody's favorite segment of the week, BC Sunday School. Molly, what's on your mind in month three or four now, starting month four being in a business? I would definitely like to say that as of right this second, literally you're hearing this on Sunday or Monday, Monday marks my official one quarter, like my 90 days. I started on January 4th. Yeah. Had a full on quarter. Great.

I got four, I have four companies in the mix. Great. Some form. There you go. I know. You're officially going to be off probation. VC probation. Are you going to learn my last name?

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Which for last name? Is it W? This is going to be huge for me. It's going to be huge. So VC Sunday school, yes. I mean, this is so great because all these issues.

are coming up in real time. And one of the things that we do at our firm is is cultivate a lot of inbound and have a lot of conversations about outbound. And we have an interview coming up soon with Dave Samuels in which we talked about the warm intro. That's like a very common sort of thing that happens in B.C. is obviously a lot of what we do is about deal flow. So what I wanted to ask you about today specifically is this idea of inbound versus out. outbound and the best way to get companies. Like, we're lucky. Sure.

A lot comes to us, but you can turn over a lot of rocks in life and find cool companies there too. I fully believe that like you're only as good as your deal flow when you're an investor. And so at the start of my career, I was lucky having been a former journalist and known a lot of people and having been a blogger and having had a podcast or having done the media for a long time as an editor and a publisher. I just knew a lot of people. And so when I put the shingle out and said,

hey, I'm a Sequoia Scout, I'm making these little bets. You know, I started to get some deal flow. But then I was like, not enough. And I had been doing events, etc. So I started Open Angel Forum, where I just said, I'm looking for six or seven companies to present for three or four minutes each to 10 angels. And I was like, I'm going to use those Angels' reputations and bringing 10 people together

to increase my deal flow. And fantastically at Open Angel Forum, my friend, Travis came and pitched Uber and three people invested. Sian first round myself. Chris Saka used to come to this event. Matt Mullenweg would come. And just anybody who was making small bets, Matt works at creative WordPress. And so that juiced the number of deals I would see.

And you want to put a shingle out and build a brand as a VC. And there's many different places where startups emerge from. It's not that you have to all go after the same deal. flow. It's just you have to have some deal flow. Now, if you're Sequoia and you get a job working as a partner at Sequoia, well, everybody wants to visit Sequoia's offices, and so you can draft on that brand. But, you know, and you to a certain extent get to leverage the deals we already have or that people already know this podcast, so that's great. I think, you know, going out and strategically contacting founders is a great thing to do. So that's what I've charged.

a lot of our young guns here at launch is, hey, I want you to go out there and hunt. It's not enough to just follow up with all the people emailing me or trying to get to me. Go ahead and look for SaaS companies and email them cold or ask other investors if they've invested in an interesting SaaS company. So since we have the SaaS syndicate, we're doing that. And we have a practice area now for climate and you're doing that. So I think, you know, at the early stages of your career, it's great to do outreach. Yeah.

And to be fair, although we have a great reputation and a lot of people know you, lunch doesn't have a history, a long history in climate. And I am sort of contemplating like, how do I go out there and really like track these people down? Yeah. And, you know, they're out there, you know, people, there are other climate investors. So breaking bread and building relationships with other investors,

sending them, and I talk about this at Angel University, the course I teach all the time, hey, listen, if you know the 10 people who invested in Com with you and you email them, hey, I invested incom.com with you, I have this new company I'm looking at. It's called Steasy and this other one, FitBod, and they're kind of consumer subscriptions as well. Would you like an introduction here as a snapshot?

And hey, do you have any interesting companies you're investing in right now? The reciprocity effect kicks in. You're offering something. Somebody's going to want to reciprocate and thank you for that. And sometimes I'll buy a cup of coffee. Okay, nice, but no big deal. What you really want is, hey, know any great companies.

And so early in my career, I would just email random folks, founders I knew, know of any interesting founders. Now today, there's so many founders out there and we're so high profile, we get a deluge and we're really have to sort well and make sure we don't miss something that's coming in. That's really the sin when you become a super router

is having a bad sorting ability and losing a deal because it just went by your inbox too fast. And that's the challenge. So many different ways to build up that deal flow. A lot of people are copying what we're doing here in terms of starting a podcast, a blog. Those are ways to put your shingle out there, be active on Twitter,

and kind of build a persona. But I do like the idea of just deftly e-cold emailing folks. Hey, I'm a VC. I see what you're doing and personalizing it. I think most VCs are too proud and too lazy to do that. I think it's a super weapon for your first couple of years as a VC. I wonder too, when you talk about inbound and the fear of missing something because there is like this fire hose of companies.

coming at us every day, which is amazing, right? That feels like such a gift. But is that why you think some, not everybody takes inbound to that extent? Because it's overwhelming or they're afraid they're going to miss a deal? Like, how do you think about filters, if at all? I mean, it seems to me more is better. More is better, but it is one of these things where people generally have too much inbound. And then they get to a point of VC entitlement that I found incredibly annoying where people will do a tweet storm or write a blog post or go on a tirade. If you're contacting me, you should be, you should have five customers and you should have raised a seed round.

I don't do seed. I do series A only. And I don't do biotech and I will not do consumer, but I will do consumer subscription. And like the founders are supposed to mind read the investor or they should have read the investor's blog post from seven years ago. that's 20 blog posts back or some tweets to them they did, as if every founder is, you know, reading every single tweet that a VC does and they need to mind read them.

So I love when a VC gets to that VC entitlement and they're like, why are you emailing me? You know, you don't have product market fit yet. I only invest when you have post product market fit or I only invest in SaaS. I only invest in consumer, whatever it is. So, you know, don't get high on your own supply if you're an investor is what I try to explain to our team. Be humble.

never underestimate anyone because you do it at your peril. I've seen people who, you know, have super gnarly pitches for really dumb products or services you know just based on your spidey sense and, you know, you know it's going to fail, but you see the energy level, you see the hustle, the chutzpah,

the jeun et ce qua, you know, I don't know what to call it, but that's something special. Leto as Adam Newman. Exactly. Well, it could be that. It could be unbridled ability to sell. It could also be an incredible design of the product. So they design a product that's absolutely stunning that only three people in the world need.

And two of them are the founders of the company and one of them is their cousin. Nobody else needs this because they just love pickup basketball. I mean, I get the pickup basketball or the, you know, finding a tennis match, you know, concept from everybody. And it's like, yeah, okay, I'm sure there's a thousand people this weekend who are looking for a pickup basketball. basketball game or 10,000 who are looking for a tennis match. But nobody's ever built that into a big enough product that people are willing to pay for it rather than just going to the tennis club and trying to find a game or just not doing it. And maybe the matching algorithm is yet to be written and that'll be a great startup idea. But I'll see people put 10,000 hours of their

time collectively, you know, a team of five into building the most amazing way to build a gorgeous app that matches people who want to play pickup basketball at one o'clock on Sundays and nobody pays for it into foul. So you kind of really have to keep an open mind. If they don't hit it on this startup, well, they're going to get their asses kicked and waste two or three years of their life, waste in quotes. And then what are they going to do next? You know, or but what if it works? But what if it works? But what if it works? So I'm sitting here dogging the idea of like the tennis matching, you know, pickup basketball game matching, soccer matching.

I get this pitch all the time. And sometimes it's a really crummy product. It's great. But you know what? There might be an AI one that someday will go across the entire internet, find everybody who wants to play tennis in real time, and then just start suggesting to them, hey, here's the AI and the machine learning actually solves that problem.

It wasn't an app that would solve it. It wasn't SMS that would solve it, not chat rooms, not blogs, not a social network. It turned out AI and machine learning actually did it. Okay. great, but, you know, until that day happens, you know, I think keep an open mind is what I like to say. Hiring well is one of the most important things a startup can do to increase their chances of having outlier success. So if your current hiring strategies aren't working, well, Rocket can help you. Rocket is trusted by companies like Tinder, nerd wallet, and Carter because it was started

by former tech founders who understand how to hire at scale. Rocket was built by founders for founders, and they use machine learning to supercharge their team of 60 recruiters to help you close hires quickly and at a high quality level. They'll help you hire from freelance to executives, and this is a white-glove service, folks. They're going to save your time, they're going to help you meet better candidates, and they're going to lower the number of hiring mistakes. Rocket is currently helping a well-funded, early-stage API company called Rudder, R-U-T-T-E-R, and they're helping them hire across engineering, product, marketing, and sales, and it's going great.

Rudder's founder had this to say, couldn't recommend a better early stage recruiting partner to work with. Here's your call to action. Getrocket.com slash twist and use the promo code twist for 20% off your first placement. Zero dollars required up front. So there's no risk. That's getrocket.com slash twist. And remember to use the promo code twist to save 20% off.

And then I am definitely, and this is like I can already tell in quarter, in Q2 of, for me, my personal Q2, like that networking tab, that. that sharing deal flow is, you know, a thing to keep working on. I'm building my little email list of fellow climate investors that I want to, like, send stuff to. But how do you think about those intros? They're apparently, according to producer Nick, thanks for digging up the dirt. You got into a little back and forth in 2020 about this idea of the double opt in warm intro, which first of all, what is that?

I find this like a little tedious. It's just like, there's a lot of like super pressure. folks who are like first rule of introductions double opt in second rule of introductions make it easy by providing a clean email exactly as outlined by dk below this is jeremy lou who's now uh retired and flashing his BLM stop asian hate um hashtags in his name this is back in 2020 and i'm just like 2020 yeah 2020 i'm just like please email me i don't care how you format the email you don't need an introduction just email me the real real like let's get to work you know like and so this what i was talking about like precious vc's like get high on their own

apply and they don't want the deal flow anymore and they don't they you know they've made too much money fantastic but double opt in is I want to meet Molly Wood and you know will you introduce me to Molly and so I forward you the person's email and say would you like to meet this founder my approach always is I tell people you don't need to double opt in if you want to just meet a founder just hit reply and just CC them and I'm a big boy I can yeah you know just say not interested I got one of those and I didn't know it had a name. But now I will totally write back to that person. Because I wrote back and was like, yes, please introduce me.

But really good point that I should also write back and be like, by the way, you don't have to ask. I just tell people, don't double opt in. Just anytime you meet a great founder, introduce me. Right. You don't have to ask me. Just introduce me. And so now Eric Reese, who always likes to introduce founders, he just introduces me. And if I think it's great, I'll get back to them.

If I don't, I'll say it's not a fit, the end, you know? And it's like, it's kind of the job. so I like less friction on the double opt-ins just it's like over but you know if you're a high profile person I can understand it

I understand my people want to do double opt-in they might not be highly social people and a social interaction if you're an introvert is exhausting and so I find it's the introverts

who want the double opt-in because they don't want to say no to a company that they could have had you just not introduce them to to begin with so they send you something and I don't know, biotech, and you're just like,

yeah, don't do biotech, but thanks. So now you're telling your friend, the VC, I just don't do biotech, thanks.

Boom, the end. Yeah. It seems to me that as a VC, it seems to me in my brief time here, that it's up to me to manage my email, my time, and my responses.

Everybody else's job is to get in front of me, and I want that to happen no matter how it happens, right? Like, my job is C is my, as much as I can possibly see. Make my horizon as big as I can possibly see it because who knows where on the horizon the unicorn sits. We, you know, we say it's a numbers game for founders when we're advising them to raise their next round. It's a numbers game for VCs as well. How many

meetings can you do? And the more meetings you do, the better you get at the job, the more knowledge you have. And we have this great gift now of Zoom where you're not trapped in a room with somebody with bad breath who's a weirdo and you made the mistake. to take this meeting and this is like not a credible entrepreneur who is insane like it does happen

like that some crazy person could somehow get in the room with somebody and you're like oh my God I'm traveling to a room with this person for an hour this makes no sense I should have read the deck

ahead of time and so it used to be VCs sometimes who just take the meeting they'd be like oh Jason introduced me to them oh Saka introduced me to them sure come over tomorrow

at 1 o'clock that's kind of how the industry used to work if somebody credible sent you somebody and then they would be like oh let me show you what I'm working on

And you'd find out in the room. Now people are a little more cutthroat, right? Like, send me the teaser deck. Let me look at the materials. Then we'll set up a Zoom. And we'll keep it to 20 minutes, be an introductory call. And the founders kind of like that better.

Everybody, the industry, likes that better post-COVID. It's great. And it's super democratizing, too, because nobody has to come to, you know, I mean, honestly, whenever people are like, can you come to San Francisco and have a meeting with me? I'm always like, get in your car and come to Oakland. Oh, everybody always wants to. to come there.

The city is like, even like a meeting. It's like, what are we talking about here? Just jump on a Zoom. Have a cup of coffee on Zoom. Jump on a Zoom. But I mean, even pre-COVID. And now it's like you could be in any town. You could be, you know, and.

On the beach. In a forest. Right. And why. Yeah. Anyway, I'm with you. I don't mean this to turn into a rant about democratizing V.C. But if you want to democratize VC, have inbound.

And then use your time on outbound to find the, the founders that you. you want, the underrepresented founders, the people in a different state. Like, we have to do the work too. We can't just sit here and wait to be introduced to people. It's very simple to just look at, you know, a database like Crunchbase or a pitch book or to read the trades and look for people doing interesting stuff. And then look at their website, see if it's interesting, check and see if there's any funding history in one of the venture databases and contact them, right? It's not that hard to do, folks.

But you have to have resources. And so a lot of times, angels who are starting out, they don't have a lot of infrastructure. Now, look, you're coming in to launch in my second decade of investing. We have a lot more infrastructure here. We have researchers.

We have people doing outbound. We have different devices, open scouting, you know, and other devices, remote demo day, founder university. We got a lot of different swings at bat. So I'm always trying to try different swings at bat. And then eventually, you know, maybe the syndicate.com will have more of a platform feel right now. It's just like a landing page.

Sign up. We'll send you a deal memo. It's very basic and simple and I like it that way. But eventually, you know, we have a little slack experiment going on with some syndicate members. We'll imagine if the 300 or 400 people who already signed up were the syndicate.com slash climate, if those three or 400 people were in a room together talking to you, right? Or some virtual space. It could be interesting. Totally.

Love it. All right. There's a D.C. Sunday school. There you go. Inbound versus outbound. And very excited. Stay tuned for today's This Week in Climate Startups interview. We have landed like the whale, the Pied Piper of the climate startup universe.

Jason Jacobs of My Climate Journey, MCJ. He is a founder, founded runkeeper. And then I love runkeeper. Yeah. I know. I told him. I was like, that's the runkeeper is how I trained for and ran my first and probably only half marathon. So thanks for that.

And then founded this My Climate Journey podcast as a way to just sort of learn about the climate space. Now is an investor is really like a big, big name here. And you are going to want to listen to this at one X. One X. Maybe a little slower. Yeah. This is an interview that is basically like riding a buck in Bronco. All right.

Just trying to hang on. All right. I want to quickly explain to you one crucial type of insurance that every startup needs to have and you need to know about it. It's called cyber insurance, and obviously this covers hacks, which are happening constantly. You may not hear about them all the time because people like to keep them quiet and resolve them well. In these crazy times, you need to be protected and you need to have cyber insurance. If you don't have business insurance, let's face it, you failed one of the first steps of being a proper CEO and founder,

especially of a company backed by investors. So, startups should look no further than our friends over at Embroker. They have technology to save you time and money. Their prices are up to 20% lower and they'll give you better coverage than the incumbent. You go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. And when you work with Embroker instead of those slow incumbents, you're not dealing with these large lumbering corporations. Nope.

Your sign up takes days, not weeks, and the process is completely transparent. There's no opaque pricing. There's no wasted time. It's just easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. So to instantly buy custom built insurance for your startup, go to imbroker.com slash twist. And while you're there, you're going to get an extra 10% off by using the offer code twist. E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R-com slash twist and get that extra 10% off by using the offer code twist and not let them know you.

You listen to them on the show. All right. Great job and broker. Without further ado, here's our interview for Climate Sundays. I am so excited today to be talking to Jason Jacobs, who runs My Climate Journey. He is a podcast host and community manager at My Climate Journey, The Podcast, and a partner at MCJ collective calling himself an investor in training. I've been calling myself a baby VC.

so I'm super excited to compare notes about that. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Molly. I'm so excited to be here. I've not done much in terms of coming on other people's shows, and this is a legendary show. So what a great icebreaker? I love it.

Well, I have been saying actually pretty much since the moment I walked in the door that you were the guy we had to get because you're like, the Pied Piper for so many people who are coming into the climate tech world, into the investment world, even as founders, and, you know, at the risk of making you restate the entire premise of your show, I want to ask you about your journey to this point. Also, I want to say, though, before we start, I used RunKeeper to train for my first and only half marathon.

You were, of course, famously up, the co-founder and CEO of RunKeeper back in the day. So, like, thanks for that. It was a great experience. Well, congrats on running your first half marathon. And only. So far. When was that? It was like 2013.

It's been a minute. It's been a minute. Awesome. So MCJ. So MCJ. Yeah. Tell me what you're doing. How did you end up here?

And how's it been going? Yeah. Well, RunKeeper, I've only worked in startups, but that was the first one that I founded. And it was a long, bumpy ride. And it was kind of like a marathon at sprint pace essentially. and there were several years in, I would call like, prolonged wartime where it wasn't acute wartime. It was more like carbon monoxide kind of wartime. But ultimately, we, you know, we got the company healthy and profitable and got our narrative and focused back and

rebuilt the leadership team and were acquired by A6, the big Japanese shoe company. And it was a great outcome for everybody involved. Every class of investors made money. It was great for the team. It was life-changing for me as one of the co-founders. And I stayed on and ran digital at A6 for a couple years left, took some time off, and essentially just it kind of hit me as I was recovering how lucky it was and how many things completely outside of my control went into having that outcome. And I had some survivor guilt. I wanted to make my next chapter about purpose. I felt a duty to do so. And climate was the most purposeful problem. I could think of and certainly a big source of anxiety for me, but I didn't know anything about it.

And initially, I came in with the lens of now that I had a base hit or a double, like I'm de-risk. And so I can start another company, but this time do a moonshot type of, you know, ultra-ambitious, you know, if it works, it's huge, otherwise it craters into the ground kind of thing. And so I went in with that lens. And it was just too big a leap to try to build a company in climate, given how little I knew about these domesies. Maine. So I picked the company building path versus the climate path and I tried to start another company in an area that I wasn't as passionate about. And literally during that three or six months, that was when, so I was doing that. I got the band back together from RunKeeper, raise some money, started getting down the path. It was a pretty fascinating, awesome area, but that's for another day.

But the climate bad news kept coming. The IPCC, 1.5 degree report, Trump taking steps to a I was from Paris. The symptoms getting more visible and obvious. The scientific community foaming at the mouth. Nobody listening. I was just having a harder and harder time focusing on anything that wasn't climate change. So about three and a half years ago, I still had almost all the capital in the bank. We just raised a little bit to get off the ground, returned it, gave it back, and came back into climate. But instead of coming into the lens of what kind of moonshot type company am I going to start, it was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know if I'll start a nonprofit. I don't know if I'll start a for profit. I don't know if I'll

run for office. I don't know if I'll join someone else is saying, I have no idea, but I'm just going to start by learning about climate change. That was three and a half years ago. And it's been a very organic process, just starting by talking a lot of people, started sending regular updates monthly of the ground I was covering and whatever is that I was tackling next. Distribution this was growing. People from my old life started picking their heads up and heading down a similar path would come to me and say, what should I do. And it's like, I don't know what you should do, but I wish you could learn from all the people I'm learning from. So started recording those discussions with the podcast,

done hundreds of episodes at this point. Inbox started filling up people binging on the show. Those were awesome people, super engaged. They didn't know each other. And set up a Slack community, which has now grown into thousands of people. And lots of co-founders met in there. Nonprofits got started in there,

open source projects that are hatched in there. A bunch of hiring has gotten done. Companies raised money, meetups in different cities all over the world. started writing Little Angel Chets is another way to learn that evolve now we have a fun

we backed 60 climate tech companies in the last year and a half and I brought in four partners we're getting ready to scale a lot and yeah but just such a weird kind of organic unscripted type of story

and it's hard to explain what I do which is why it just took me three minutes to answer a simple question that's great because now I have roughly 100 follow-up questions on each chunk of that so what

like did the podcast come first where you're sort of sitting there going okay i want to start this something i'm not sure how everything is content let me start there uh no literally it was just let me start reading about climate and talking to the like people that are in the thick of the action with different perspectives and given that i had heard my whole career has been in startups. And given that I'd heard that innovation gets more hype than it's worthy of, um, as it relates to addressing climate change, I actually started by talking to a lot of people that weren't working in startups. So I talked to professors. I talked to, um, heads of NGOs. I, I talked to IPCC scientists. I talked to people in the national labs. I was just

trying to cast a wide net and just start somewhere and start learning. And then as I started pulling on threads, it led to more threads and more introductions. And those people, because we were coming out of the kind of the dark years where, you know, 06 to 09, and I heard your episode with Andrew Beebe, like, you know, a lot of money went in and, and got set on fire. And so a bunch of people in capital fled the space. And so for whatever reason, probably because a lot of people, you know, People were becoming woken up to the gravity of the situation.

But I was just the person who happened to have no job while they were having that awakening and who didn't have time pressure to get a job. So therefore, I had the time to just learn full time. And as I was out reaching out to these people, they would say, oh, it's so great to see new blood coming in. Like, welcome back. Like, I can't wait to see where you end up. Keep me posted on your progress. So then I started sending email updates, almost like you would send to investors in the early days of a startup. But I didn't have a startup and I didn't have investors.

So when I started doing that, it was some forced accountability every month. And it would lead to more and more introductions, growing distribution list. And what started happening was one piece was the people reaching out and saying, hey, like, where should I start? What should I do? And me not having a great place to point them, but talking to all. all these great people all day long and none of that knowledge getting shared. But another piece was I kind of miss building something.

And so, oh, and then the third piece was that for that false start I had, it was essentially a content studio at the intersection of, um, uh, live TV and native mobile application.

So it was like taking the HQ trivia format and figuring out where else can you, you can apply it beyond prize based entertainment. But when I was doing that, I was behind the scenes, but I kind of had the hitch to be a host, right? Um, and so it was like,

you know what? Why don't I just start a podcast? It would be fun. I learned so much. It would give me something to build. Like, it's not a business. It's not a company. But it would be just a fun project. And it would be strategic for whatever I end up sinking my teeth into and climb it. And then once I did the podcast, then people were listening and I was uncovering like, oh, it's not a ton of listeners, but the people listening are super engaged, super kind of strategic people. And they come from really diverse backgrounds, different industries, different functions, different geographies. And they don't know each other and they're longing for a peer group, like, we should find a way to get these

people together, which is, um, we set up the Slack Room. We had a first kind of ad hoc meetup that was community organized in San Francisco just before the pandemic, uh, lockdown. And I went to that and we did a live recording at that meetup, but there were like 80 or 100 people there. Um, and these were like, like, there were awesome people, right? It wasn't like the weakest of the pack that were fleeing from Silicon Valley Tech. It was like, it was like awesome, you know, high octane strategic, motivated people in the prime of their careers that were looking to, like, come in and swing a big bat in this area, but they didn't know where to start like me. And those people kind of formed a tribe.

And I just kind of lucked into being there right at the beginning of that, at least for this wave. Listen, lots of founders are Lucy Goosey with their personal numbers. We all know that. They put it on company documents. They use it for sales calls and more. And that's where things get super messy. You don't know who's calling you, right? Is it a sales prospect?

Is it a coworker? Or is it somebody from your kid's school? Is it spam? Well, open phone helps you create business phone numbers for you and your team. And it works through an app on your smartphone, very elegantly, or on your desktop. You just pick a number, you install the app, and you're done. There is no need to carry two phones like I do. And there's so many features you're going to love, including you know how we all create

catch-all emails like support at our company name.com. Well, you can do something similar for a phone number. You can have a shared phone number with multiple employees fielding those incoming text and the calls. What a brilliant idea. See what Open Phone can do for you. It's already affordable at a starting price of just $10 a month per user. So affordable. And Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months by signing up at Openphone.co slash twist.

And if you have existing numbers from another service, no problem. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy, open phone can port them over for free. Just head over to OPEN, P-H-O-N-C-O-C-O-C-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-E. openphone.com slash twist today. Yeah. So, okay, so there you are. You're building this community and now the, I'm going to sort of try to take this like step by step all the way up to the fund. So now you have this community and you've created a membership out of that, right, that people can pay for and can come to these member specific events.

You're working on perks around that. Like, talk to me about building that community and how you see that evolving. Like, are they your investors now? Are they helping to sort of create a movement even? Yeah, well, so as the show is played out, and we've done hundreds of episodes at this point, there's one of the things that's unique about MCJ, or maybe it's not unique, but it's just different than a lot of others that I've come across is that climate touches everything, and so it's not, it isn't a sector, it's every sector and no sector at the same time.

I mean, we need to rewire our entire global economy, right? And what that means is that you have sector specialists in mobility. You have sector specialists in deep tech or in insurance or in AI or in Web 3 or FinTech or things like that. Like you could build a climate company in any of those categories plus, you know, a thousand others. And so we are sure. super broad, right? Not just innovation, but, uh, or, you know, not just one type of innovation, but lots of types of innovation and not just innovation, but policy, activism, advocacy, uh, um, you know, government, elected officials, democracy, uh, science, um, you know,

we had on the chief of staff for cop, uh, I think it was COP 26 recently. Yeah. Um, and so, suit, you know, we've had like the head of the solar. geoengineering lab at Harvard and we've had, you know, like, I haven't yet, but at one point I'd have to have on the head of the coal miner labor union, right? So it's like, we really want to hear from the perspectives that don't often get hurt from, but that really matter in the transition. And because of that, we have a listenership who, it's not just newcomers like me. It's also people who've maybe been working on it for a long time, but in one piece of it, right? And because it's just a systems problem, all these other pieces matter. And they, you know,

You know, they're booked. They're booked. They're booked just going deep in whatever their piece is, meaning this holistic view is really important. And so that's where the content comes in is on educating. And it's not focused on the listeners. It's just focused on me selfishly following my own intellectual curiosity and trying to learn.

But it enables listeners to go on that journey with me, which I think if you're in the right frame of mind where you're hungry for that, you really appreciate. And if you're not on the right frame of mind, you find it boring and dry. And you'd rather go listen to Joe Rogan or something. something. But then those people who are serious, they don't, it's like learning is like the gateway drug. Right. And so once they start learning, they're like, okay, you know, I'm like 100 episodes in, but I keep hearing about this community of people that are binging on the show and those people are getting together in real life and those people are forming ventures together and those people

are joining each other's companies and those people are challenging each other's assumptions and they have book clubs and study groups and they do, you know, small bite-sized collaboration and they do, you know, they go on and build generational firms together. Like, I think I'm ready to take that next step and find my people because wherever it is I am in my, you know, big CPG firm or at my traditional tech firm or wherever I am, like, I'm kind of an outlier because I'm super concerned about this and can't stop thinking about it. But like, you know, I'm kind of more ready to act than. it seems like the people to my left and to my right are and how can I find more people like me? So that's the roots of the community. And as the, I mean, the community has grown. It's interesting because we, you know, we have all the guests in the show.

We have all the members in the community. We have the 60-something companies with the portfolio founders, the fact. And then we have over 300 individual LPs who are largely people who have been handpicked, who, you know, happen to have some means, but they're, you know, It's, they're a good fit for us, the same reason we're a good fit for them. It's like they want to get closer to the action. They want to learn. They want to inform what to do with their capital and with their time.

And they want to help and they think there's money to be made. So it's kind of all those things. So it's not like pitching fund of funds or things like that. And what that means is that there's this really great virtuous cycle. It's like a flywheel where we'll have a guest on the show. we'll publish the episode, a bunch of members will get in touch, and several of them will get hired by that company, and others will become customers of that company. And then that founder's like, man, you guys are so helpful. I want to be in business with you. Like, I'm about to do a round,

you know, I'd love a little check from you guys to get in business together. And then, you know, we get in business with them. And then given where we sit and everyone we know and what we see in touch, we can be helpful on the people side with, you know, customers and hires and media and, you know, non-dilutive financing opportunities. and, you know, follow-on funding opportunities and just people. And, and then, you know, they're like, you know, they'll tell their cohorts in YC, for example, like, man, MCJ's been so helpful. Like, you got to work with them if you're a climate company and then we'll get deal flow. And then those founders, you know, when they go through Series B and get some, you know, secondary and have some dry powder, they'll become LPs.

And so it just, and then several of their team will then become members, right? And so the cycle continues. So I mean, in a way, we're not a fun that happens to do content and community. We have these three legs of the stool. We have a media arm. We have a membership arm and we have a capital arm. But each is kind of an MVP. And directionally, we think there's an expansion path for each independently.

We think that over time, the, you know, the whole should equal and increasingly greater total than the, you know, than the sum of its parts. But we also think there's other legs of the stool we can add over time. And it's all kind of in service of, well, building a generational firm and having profits because profits can drive more impact. But at the end of the day, it's impact that drives us. We know, though, if we set a bunch of money on fire, then we're not going to stay in business, let alone grow. And so if we want to grow our impact, we need to grow the profits that we're delivering to our stakeholders over time. Yeah. At what point did the community and the content become the capital?

Like, when did you start the fund? And was it people just saying like, hey, you're rolling. here. You're crushing it. Start investing for us. Yeah, well, I started, so I was recording these episodes and I, and we had this member community and started thinking about, oh, and then initially had avoided innovation, but then ultimately realized that, hey, like innovation isn't the only thing that matters by any stretch, but it is a pillar that does matter. And that's a relief because my whole career There's been an innovation, you know, early stage technology innovation.

That's what I love. Can I stop you there to clarify a little bit? When you say you had avoided innovation, what do you mean? Oh, I mean, like when I was coming in, my whole career has been in small, high growth startups backed by venture capital. When I first started my climate journey, I was not reaching out to people working in climate startups. I was reaching out to people.

So you weren't thinking in the tech space then. You were thinking like, how do we, how do I understand this entire climate crisis? Yeah. I wanted to get a holistic view before I went to, anywhere. Gotcha. Yeah. And because I was deepest in tech already coming in, I avoided it.

But as I started coming back around to it, because kind of the overall frame was starting to become clear. Then I said, okay, now let me dig into tech. And so I started talking to founders. And then I said, I want to get closer to the action and understand what's happening in these companies because I don't know anything about these domains. And so I took a portion of my personal assets and essentially earmarked it the way that you would earmark to go back to grad school or something like tuition.

It wasn't about financial investment. It was about learning. And I just wrote intentionally small checks and tried to get into companies where there were teams that felt compelling that were in areas that felt like big levers for decarbonization that had ideas that intuitively made sense to my untrained ears and had some. and had some smart institutional capital either in there or coming in alongside. And I just started writing these little checks.

I did probably, I think, 12, 15 of those. And some of those started raising follow-on, started point together some SPVs to take bigger allocations and subsequent rounds. And the other thing is that my small checks for learning started growing and I started writing some real personal checks. And that wasn't because I had some big liquidity event or something.

It was because I was starting to get my bearings and see what conviction felt like. And in some of these cases, you know, I might have done a, you know, a 25 instead of a 10. But if I had the capital, I would have done a 250 or 500, but I didn't. And I wasn't going to get it. And so it started feeling like I was cutting into bone, not having a bigger piggy bank. There was a subset of the member community that is ultra liquid. And increasingly, you know, but maybe they're booked.

Maybe they're a CTO at one of the big, you know, pillar technology companies. and they've already decided that they want climate to be the next phase of their career, but they're booked as a senior executive at this publicly trading company. And like, you know, the type of capital to commit to, you know, an emerging manager like this is, I mean, a rounding error for them, but they can get closer to the action. And for me, it's quite meaningful. So those conversations started coming inbound. And it's funny because I started thinking about raising a traditional fund, but I was concerned

because I'd been learning in public across everything else. And the SEC rules about general solicitation and clamming up and not being able to talk about it when you're raising. Like, that really bugged me. Not about fundraising, but about just like, I don't want to be muzzled about anything. And that was one concern. Another concern was if I wanted the fund to be of any size, I probably needed at least one or two institutional anchors.

And at least at that time, talking to institutional people. when I was kind of like cowboy in the Wild West felt like the analogy that I said before when asked about this is like Ben Affleck from Goodwill Hunting where he he's got the suit on with his like grease down hair and his like white sweat socks and he's like totally fish out of water like that's me talking to these like you know. Pension funds. Yeah. Yeah.

It's pension fun. I was sitting there and like my running running outfit, you know, just not wanting to play that game. And when I was trying to navigate that, that was right around the time that Angelus was coming out with the rolling fund structure. And going back to the runkeeper days, we built one of the first apps in the app store in 2008, like literally they're right at launch. And felt our way in the dark. And there were some downsides of being that early. But that was also really exciting. And we kind of thrived when, you know, in that mode where it's early and fluid and fast changing and fortune favors the bold.

And like, I don't know, I kind of, I like that phase. And rolling funds are in the same spot, right? Where we built one of the first rolling funds. Now we have one of the biggest. And we have a second rolling fund that we added, which is, you know, writes bigger, much fewer, bigger, more concentrated checks and primarily, but not exclusively select follow-ons from the core fund portfolio. But we, yeah, we've been kind of riding that wave.

And it's worked really well because it's been an easy entry point to get a bunch of, as we get new members, they come in. And it's almost like, it's like at a car wash when you have a basic car wash and you can upgrade to like the wheel wax or the interior cleaning. It's like you can be a member, right? Or you can be a member and become an LP. Right. And so it's been really great so far. But yeah, but I would still, I would call it an MVP.

I think longer term, you know, we want to start growing up these pillars. And each will have to think about how to take the magic of what's been working. and scale it a lot, and then what are the elements that we need to retain? And then what are the elements that we need to blow up and rethink as it relates to structure, resourcing model, etc. Yeah. How now as you're thinking about investing, I wonder, you know, having spent so much time immersed in all of the aspects of this problem, and there are many, did you distill that to a thesis

in terms of investing? No. and part of that is so there's people spend a lot of time I think Chris Saka calls it a green on green crime where

like there's just a lot of infighting about like Renovals, nuclear efficient fusion like policy you know activism like you know oil and gas needs to die you know oil and gas

companies are a key part of the solution like natural gas is a bridge like natural gas is a long term piece like you know adaptation resilience to me you know matters like adaptation resilience is for quitters right like yeah um it's dizzying right and and we really i mean we want a pressure test to make sure the stuff we're doing is impactful but at the same time like we just want to grow the top of the funnel with like smart people making thoughtful bets and we really think that um there's some obvious things that do, like when people say, we don't need breakthrough innovation, we need to just deploy what we've got. It's like, you know, okay, yes, we need to deploy what we've got. But like,

the types of people in capital that would go for like frontier type of breakthrough innovation are different buckets and different skill sets and different makeups than that. So they're not actually in competition with each other. The answer's both, right? And yeah. And so we just want more, right? And not just blindly more. Like, you know, let's go, like, throw a billion dollars at some unproven ethanol thing or something. Like, that's not what I'm saying. Like, I'm, but like, if it's a smart team, like, mission driven. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, but like, some of the stuff, like, look at what Stripes doing. Like, who would have ever predicted that a payments company could be making such a big impact on client? And of course, I hear the critics on my ear like, well, but their dollars are so small and they're doing carbon removal and carbon removal is a distraction. It's like, but this is a payments company. Like, forget about, let's see.

you know, we can still have those debates, but like, this is a payments company that is actually, like, generating a good deal of funding for this stuff that, you know, was not able to get funded. This stuff is starting to progress. It's still early, but it is starting to progress. And they're setting an example and inspiring much deeper pocketed cohorts from other pockets of industry to follow suit. Like, what they're doing is amazing, right? And, like, you would have never found in drawdown, like, well, the 100th drawdown solution is for the payments company.

to, you know. Right, totally. So, like, I'm sorry, that is not refrigerants. We cannot talk about that. Yeah, so we look in, I mean, we look across sectors and we just, we just look for like things that inspire us. And we have a, we call it a blog post test. Like, we try to be as public as we can about these investments whenever the founders

allow us. And when we write the post, it's like, you know, we know that our LPs in the aggregate, different ones are motivated differently, but we know in the aggregate and our member community, for that matter, it's kind of one part profit and one part impact, right? And so anything we do needs to stand on its own two feet for each of those independently of each other. And if it really shines in one and doesn't pass the bar and the other, we shouldn't do it, regardless of which way that goes. But it could come from anywhere. And the way we get around that lack of sector expertise is that we're not leading these rounds. We're not

setting terms. We're not taking board seats. These are small checks as part of larger rounds with strong institutional leads. And in many cases, there are leads that we work with again and again that are sharing their diligence, that are out talking to the customers, that are, you know, that are pressure testing the IP. They're like doing all the things that we would be doing if we were leading, but we're intentionally not leading, which allows us to, you know, do a fusion investment one day and a fertilizer investment the next day and a battery investment the next day and an insurance investment the day after that and a mobility investment the day after that and a carbon marketplace investment the day after that, right?

It's because we surround ourselves with expertise and we, you know, draft behind some of the diligence of our strong institutional partners, probably two or three dozen of which at this point are personal LPs and our fund from a bunch of the top funds across the venture capital asset class as well as private equity. Yep. Yeah. So what is your check size then generally? the core fund today, 100 to 250K is standard.

We've done, as I mentioned, I think 60 of those over the last year and a half. A lot of them are seeds and A's, but we've done a bunch of Bs and C's and Ds as well from companies who are building category leading companies and whatever their category is that are very impactful for climate that are breaking out from the pack whose CEOs are probably LPs in our fund, right? So it just kind of the machine feeds itself. And then the opportunity fund is new. So our first quarter was this quarter, Q1.

And that one today, it's $1 to $2 million checks. And again, primarily, but not exclusively select follow-ons from the core portfolio. Still not pricing, still not leading, still not setting terms, still not taking board seats. But, you know, the way our 250K check is a, you know, is a small part of a $5 million round. The Opportunity Fund's million, you know, 1.5 million check is a small piece of that 50 million round. And then, you know, we're starting to hit some constraints. You know, constraints around capital under management as it relates to sophisticated LPs and some complexity around the rolling fund structure. And also constraints around long-term planning, given that rolling funds have a one-quarter deployment period at a time.

So it's, you know, whereas a traditional fund, you can look much further out. So, you know. Wait, so what do you mean constraints? Like, you need to get bigger? figure out how to get... Well, we need... You're outgrowing your box? We need a bigger pool of capital

and we need a longer term pool of capital. And so we don't know yet what we'll do. I'm certainly not announcing anything or talking about anything. I mean, you can. This is a great opportunity for that. No. And that's the kind of thing that would definitely get us in trouble. But I think that's the type of stuff that we think about

because if we want to build a generational firm, then we need a structure in place that enables us to actually plan as it relates to things like core team member headcount and salaries and stuff like that because it's that it's that team that then feeds the beast of the differentiation and the value that then gets us the access to put the capital to work. But that team costs money. And if if broader macroeconomic conditions, you know, change dramatically overnight and half your LP base goes away through nothing that you, you know, factors outside of your control. then, then, you know, like it's scenarios like that that we're trying to avoid. So we don't know what the answer is, but that's the kind of stuff we're thinking about. Got it. Tell me about impact.

You mentioned, you know, there's profit and then there's impact. Are you tracking it? I noticed on your website, like all your portfolio companies fall into categories, you know, whether it's energy or water or decarbonization. Are you keeping any kind of metrics around impact? well, some of our peers look at things like gigatons, you know, like if it's, you know, we need to see that it'll, you know, reduce or remove half a gigatone per year of emissions when it's, you know, upon success, right? When it's in its, it's fullest form or things like that. And we're big believers that there should be some accountability and that we should be tracking.

in reporting on impact, I think one challenge that we have is that we think that gigatons are certainly important, but it's not the only thing that matters, at least in our worldview. And for example, if there were a company that were out there taking workers from dying industries and rescilling them to, you know, to be out there building the infrastructure to power the clean energy transition, then we think that's highly impactful. But would that pass the half a gigaton test? Right. Probably not, right? But we should still do that investment and be proud of it, right? Or what's another example? Let's say there's a media company that is out there winning hearts and minds and like hitting people between the eyes and getting them to say, aha, like, this is the

challenge of our lifetime and I need to do something about this from wherever I sit, right? And it inspires instead of like the, you know, a few thousand people in the MCJ community, it inspires like, you know, 50 million people, right? Well, is that impactful for the climate movement? I think it is, right? How many gigatons is it responsible for pulling out of the air or otherwise reducing, right? Right? Well, that's a really, I don't know if you can do that math, right? But we should, but that, that, that, that, that, that, um, that, um, that, um, that, um, that, um, that, um, that, um, uh, that, um, uh, and I would say, will, will, will come. And for now, what we rely on is just when we, when we do an investment or do anything for that matter, when we have a guest on the show, what, like, you know, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we're public about it as public as we can be.

And we feel accountability to explain ourselves in our decision making with the understanding that sometimes we have blind spots and that the feedback helps us get better and smarter over time. Yeah, totally. I have created, I think, what I'm, I consider this very amorphous bucket for the things you're describing that I call behavior. You know, like I'm into gigatons. I'm into behavior.

how can you adapt consumer behavior in some way or change it or change people's behavior or change the way that companies operate? And then I'm into systems, which you've talked about before, you know? Yeah, and it really is. It's like when I think about it, I don't, like, people are like, what are the technologies that you're most excited about? It's like, look, there are certainly technologies that can make a big difference. But I don't really look at that lens. Like, I look at more through the lens of like the same flywheel that I think about for MCJ, I think. I think about for solving the problem on a broader level because I have no misconception that like Little MCJ is somehow going to, you know, solve a problem of this magnitude on our own by any stretch.

The opposite of that, I mean, we're just a little a little pebble in the ocean. But I do think that the same way there's these kind of virtual cycles and flywheels as it relates to the stuff that we're doing in our little world, those things can happen on the broader scale as well. And so as a platform, how do we facilitate that? and we do that today with, you know, with education, with convening, with programming, with,

um, uh, with breaking down silos, with making connections, with, uh, with putting capital to work in, in thoughtful ways.

Um, and we'll hopefully do more things over time. Um, but it is all about kind of feeding the beast in terms of that flywheel of change. Like the, like the snowball going down the mountain and the, the bigger it gets, the faster it goes.

The faster it goes, the bigger it gets. Yeah. A drip becomes a fly. Yep. Yep. Yep. what do you

what do you wish existed like if you could order up a climate company what would be super meaningful for you? Huh Yeah I don't I mean

I have some inches to scratch that aren't necessarily big things on the you know if you look at spreadsheets of gigatons and things like that but just personal personal stuff like you know we gotten EV in the last few months and

and we have a slate roof and we have natural gas that powers our home and you know, I'm using Arcadia today so so that's, so I can push some paper around to compensate for that outside of the home, but there's still natural gas that's like powering our home, right?

And how do I think about you know, we have one EV and one fossil car. So when we replace that fossil car, it's going to be with an but like what will it do to our like you know to our like can our house handle two EVs as an example and uh and should we be powering that with clean energy and what are our options could I go with solar like it should like to the Tesla stuff makes sense and what about a generator and you know heat pumps and like it's all I don't know it's pretty confusing for me

and it's just like it was confusing for me when I did a home renovation without this lens so you know, when we first moved in many years ago, um, I'm just not good at that stuff. And I want someone to be able to hold my hand through the whole process. And as far as I can find that doesn't exist. So there, there's an example,

but you can find like companies are going through that same thing. They're saying, well, I want to improve my footprint, but in order to improve my footprint, I first need to understand my footprint. And there's all these things out there saying there in the carbon accounting bucket,

but how can I tell one from the next? And what are they good at? What are they bad at? Where are they blind thoughts? How much work in this? Is it a real pain in the ass? Is this going to suck all my resources and kill my, profitability so that I'm going to report bad, you know, bad quarters to the street and lose my job, right?

You can't, like, you can't see me right now, so you cannot see how excited I am because you have described literally exactly the thing that I want to exist. The soup to nuts decarbonization like one stop shopping, right? The Angie's list because I really do believe in the power of the consumer. I really do think that there's a lot of value in giving them the choices to make. And aggregating it all in one place and saying, here's how you do it. Here's how you swap out the H-back. Here's how you make your home resilient.

Here's how you get the green roof. Here's how you get the off-the-grid thing. Like there's just so much opportunity to, somebody described it recently actually as like to be the apple of this space, to be the thing that just sort of abstracts out all the hard stuff. Yeah. But like what you hear from the climate community or certain elements of it is it's like, You're trying to shop your way out of the climate crisis.

I know. Well, either that or it's like, well, oh, sure, the EVs greener. But like, where do you think that EV? That EV is getting its energy from coal, right? And it's like, okay, well, but if the demand is there for the EVs, because they crack the nut on the design side and actually build a better product like Tesla has done, then with more people driving them, then it makes the business case easier to, you know, to accelerate the transition to other energy sources.

And so, like, you can. walk and chew gum. Like, what, so we should we just not push anyone to drive EVs until we get the, you know, the coral figure, it's like, there's a bunch of chicken and eggs. And you have to just kind of keep putting one foot in front of the other and take the leap that the other piece they're going to catch up. And that's a, that's just, that's an element that I feel like it's missed by a lot of people, maybe because they're just used to looking at the here and now versus being able to,

to dream. And then they would say, you know, your dreaming is not rooted in reality. Right. And the truth is somewhere in the middle. Like, you need to be a pragmatist, but you also need to be an optimist and a dreamer. And you have to like, you know, in order to find new oceans, you have to have the courage to lose side of the shore kind of thing. And it's just a bunch of pitchforks out when we're all on the same team. I know. I could not agree with you more.

It's like it's an everybody in the pool moment. And it seems like, I mean, it seems like that maybe is some of the value that all of these new, you know, this wave of new climate tech investors. and this wave of new startup CEOs can bring, which is, it is very true that people, you know, when I was covering this space as a journalist at Marketplace, it was really important for me, I think, to be like, I'm not a long time environmental journalist. There's value in that.

There's a value in a different type of thinking. And even though Silicon Valley is not going to, you know, solve this problem with a silver bullet technology, although like maybe it is. There is value in a different kind of thing. thinking and in not getting bogged down in all of the history that's gotten us to this point. Like, we are going to have to make hard tradeoffs, but we're also going to have to be able to bring a lot of imagination to this.

I wrestle with that balance all the time because on the one hand, I think that a bunch of, if I just look with my entrepreneur, had a bunch of companies that have gone to be hugely successful required beginner mind because there was just too much scar tissue in a given category. Beginner minds is such a great phrase. Yeah. So it's like, I'm coming with beginner. mind. And so it's like I kind of relish that position. But at the same time, um, the deep institutional knowledge is invaluable to. And I don't want to make,

I don't want to be the guy that comes in and repeats mistakes because, because he didn't heed the warnings from people that, that, that, that lived it before and could have easily told me if I had only listened. But at the same time, I don't want to let the scar tissue get in the way of the unbridled optimism and ignorance that that is sometimes required to make things work. Like that, that's a really hard because you don't want to be reckless, but you don't, you, you, to some degree, that blind optimism is required. And so how do you reconcile those two?

I don't know. It sounds like, I mean, you've brought that not to take us into therapy land, but you've mentioned this a couple times now. Like, are you feeling a little beat up? Like, are you getting pushback? I mean, I just feel like, I feel like we do our best and we don't always get it right, but we learn in public and that's a path we're committed to. And I think as we grow and our stature grows, I think that it's just kind of the, I mean, it's the world we're living in now, right? I mean, I think anyone who's in the public eye is feeling beat up.

And it's the internet. I'm super in the public eye, but I'm more in the public eye than if I was just working in the shadows. And so I feel it. But then the more in the public eye that I get or anyone gets, the more they might feel that way. So I, um, on the one hand, I, I certainly, um, uh, know that no matter what we do, we're never going to make everybody happy and we're going to keep doing stuff for, you know, for as far as the I can see. And hopefully more stuff and bigger stuff. Um, and, and so I'm going to need thick, thick skin to just make it through that.

But on the other, I want people to call out our bullshit in our blind spots. And so it's, I think it's a necessary path, but it isn't always an easy one, even if it's healthy. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, Jason, I hope that you

will come back regularly and update us on all the things you're building. This has been such an awesome conversation. I'm like so inspired by what you're doing and I know I'm not the only one. Well, it's great that you are turning your attention to this area as a platform because you have a big platform that's, you know, been interested in a lot of areas over time. And it's really great to see that

climate tech is becoming one of them because, you know, you and the platform that you sit on swing a big bat are very influential. So, you know, people like you that turn your attention this way can bring about a lot of good. And we need both. We need the veterans who have been in the trenches for the long time. And we need newcomers like, like you and I. And, uh, And hopefully they can meet in the middle and figure out how to play nice together and collaborate. Yeah. Everybody in the pool. Jason Jacobs.

Thanks so much for the time today. I appreciate it. Thank you, Molly. Thanks for having me. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you.

Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-AS to apply to raise from the SaaS syndicate. and you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, no cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch. Even if you don't know the founder, if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey, everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and market, some traction,

and are looking to raise at least $500,000. Apply today to Remote Demo Day for your chance to pitch to over 9,000 investors in Jason's syndicate. Submit your application at RemoteDemoday.com. Our next event is on April 27th. And if you want to learn how to invest in startups from the world's greatest angel investor, and no, we're not talking about Chris Saka, then head to Angel.combe to apply. The four-hour workshop costs $300 and all proceeds are donated to charity.

To date, we've donated over $175,000 to various charities, and you can see the full list at angel.university slash charity.