 I'm Andrew Bebe, I have the least number of patents on this panel, I also have, I tied for the least number of Olympic medals. I will let you guess who got the Olympic medal on this stage, but it was not me. I want to just confirm that everyone here is in the right room, so I'm going to ask you all a couple of questions. You can respond by just raising your hand. How many people care about climate? All right, awesome. We're definitely in the right room. It's also nice to be in Europe, not the US, where the response can sometimes be different. How many people are climate tech founders? Okay. How many people are founders? How many people are climate tech founder curious like you might want to start a climate tech company if your boss is not right next to you? Okay. For one of those reasons, one of those hand raises, you're in the right room, everyone else you might just be tired or jet lagged or something and you're just hanging out. I hope we will also provide you with some inspiration about climate tech and the opportunities that we see as investors and as former founders. What we're going to do today is dig into what I would call the decarbonization economy or the future of climate tech and try to leave you with a couple of things. One, we can't not have a little bit of walk down memory lane or history lesson because everyone up on this stage has decades of experience in the field, sometimes starting companies and sometimes funding them. But I think that there's some lessons learned from the clean tech 1.0 period. The second thing we're going to try to leave you with is a treasure map of opportunity. What we're going up here is investing, I think, really aggressively in a lot of different areas around the world within climate tech and we think that there are some great big categories that still need incredible entrepreneurship. I'm going to start off with just a couple of things that I think are different. I was a climate tech or we used to say clean tech founder back in the early days. It was 2002 when I started my company, a solar technology company. Clean tech was like a thermostat setting and the kind you used to have to slide with the thing, not Tony's kind of thermostat. And Al Gore's movie had not come out yet. So those were early, early days. It was very hard to find investors. That was a big difference. But the outcomes were also a little bit different. There were just not as many strong founders coming to the table. There were not as many major outcomes and there weren't as many unicorns. A couple of them are represented on the stage today. But now I just have a little list. Proterra, North Volt, QuantumScape, Volta, Jobe, Rivian, Lilium, Perfect Day, Beyond Meat. Those are just a few. I think we were all invested in one or two of them. But there were dozens after that that are unicorns today in the climate tech space. So I think that just shows that things have changed substantially and that we're just getting started. Goldman Sachs and I think BCG just recently came up with very similar numbers. Saying over the next 30 years, we're going to have to invest three to five trillion dollars to address the climate challenges that we face as a globe. And when investors see three to five trillion per year, it suddenly becomes one of the biggest tams imaginable. So that's what we're going to dig into right now. We've got a great lineup of fellow panelists. I hope your expectations are very high. We have a lot of shared views about what's happening here. But I think you'll also find a little bit of contrast. We came from America and we came to Europe because of a shared view that climate tech is actually more of a leadership position over here than in the US. And that's not that common in technology. A lot of technology we think of as at least starting over there and then being exported. That's changed too. But in climate tech, it seems like it's happening here first in a lot of ways. Tony got ahead of it and actually moved to Europe. The three of us just came over on jet lag inducing flights yesterday. So Tony, I'm going to start with you. You have become a legend in your ability to take boring, old things like radios or Walkmen, telephones and then thermostats and make them super sexy and something that every single human on the planet wants on their wall or in their pocket. So tell us, in your view versus climate tech 1.0, what's different this time? Great. Thanks for the great opener. Let's see. Right now, what's different is the fact that just before COVID, we were really still kind of in neutral with kind of climate change stuff. So during COVID, we've all kind of found religion or at least a lot of places have found religion on it. And instead of saying, oh, is climate change happening? It's happening. We need to do something about it, not to what level it's a different thing. But what I've always found is that it's been consumer led up till now. It was always the consumer was going to pick up something in the climate change area and help pull that forward. We're now seeing businesses actually investing in amazing ways and getting involved and saying, teach me, help me. We need to move this ball forward. So it's not just the early adopter companies. You're seeing companies across the board, across the world, wanting this technology. Sure, there's still laggards. But the early adopters and now the innovators are taking these things up and asking for solutions. I get emails each week saying, I have companies. It's these weird consultants. I have companies looking for these types of solutions. Do you have anything in your portfolio? Do you know any companies that have these kinds of things to help these other companies they're looking for? So that's one thing. The second thing that's happened that's changed is that you know how this went. All of us did 10 years ago. We're sitting here doing this and it was crickets. Absolutely. Nobody cared what we were doing. Now all of a sudden, just over the last year, I have all these huge VCs call them up. What's in your portfolio? What are you guys working on? What can we get involved in? So it has totally changed the mindset and people are now coming into this space and money's coming in this space. More brains are coming into this space than ever before. So really, it also changed. But there was a blip in 2008, 2009, where people, VCs were making those calls. They were getting excited. In 2002, when I talked to VCs, they said, Andrew, trust me, no venture capitalist is ever going to put a penny in solar. Like up and down Sand Hill Road, five years later, they were going bananas for it. So that part didn't work out for a lot of them. What's different this time? They're rushing back maybe within a couple of extra zeros. But why is the result going to be different? Why is it different is because they're hearing from their LPs. They're hearing from various big groups, big companies out there, saying, what do you have? Just like they were asking me, what do you have? They're asking those, all the VCs up here as well as out in the world, what do you have to help my company? So when they're hearing and people screaming, big companies with a billion dollar budget saying, I need this, they're taking notice and going, we need to invest so that we can see the upside on that. So it's not just doing the right thing for the planet. It's green for green. Okay. Brooke, maybe you have PTSD talking about this period. You and I were both entrepreneurs back then. Before we talk about what you're doing now, just going into that way back machine a little bit, what do you think our lessons learned from some of the experiences you had either as a founder or as you were transitioning early at Kleiner into this new phase of investing? Well, Tony I think says this very well that you have to start with the customer in mind. I think the customer mindset has shifted. I mean, it starts with movements. It starts with there's the youth movement, the Greta Thunbergs of the world rising up and getting politicians to pay attention, consumers getting CEOs to pay attention. That's real economic power and interest that's driving, I think, a lot of this capital, a lot of this regulatory shift that we're seeing. So that's one thing that's totally different now than it was. Certainly, when I started my first company in 2002, it was a desert. And it was a desert for the last 10 years or so as well. So availability of capital has changed completely as a result. And I think the opportunity set is just dramatically different now. And when did you join Kleiner's Green Growth Fund? 2010. Okay. And in 2010, it was a little contrarian still. You guys play some bets. A lot of people look back at the history of that period and say, see no one ever made any money. Why would I do this again? What's happened to that fund and performance? Yeah, look, I joined in 2010. It was right at the sort of peak of climate tech mania. We entered a phase of incredible challenges. We had the Great Recession. We had unprecedented competition from China. $10 billion going into the solar industry, which you know very well. We had the discovery of the lowest cost fossil fuel extraction technique known as fracking. Those all created huge challenges. But it turns out, in retrospect, when you go back and you look at the investments that we made right after that same time period, when everyone else in Silicon Valley was running for the hills, the investments that we made crushed it. They did incredibly well. I'll give you three data points across the stack. So in aggregate, I think there's this theory that the whole industry was a giant failure. If you look at all the dollars that went in during that time period, it's about $25 billion in total. Today, that $25 billion is worth $500 billion in public stock of companies today that are worth over a trillion dollars. So that's the aggregate. And I'd say that's hard to call that a failure. The stuff that we did specifically at Kleiner and my team in particular, John Dorr told me once that he and Vinod Kosla had this measure of whether an industry was ventureable. And they would determine that by whether or not you could return an entire fund with one investment. Turned out, we did that several times over. We did that with Nest. We did that with Beyond Meat, with QuantumScape. There's a host of other companies in there, Protera, OSISoft, Enphase, now the most valuable solar company in the world. So you look back at that era and venture capital is a hits business. So you can look at a lot of different failures. And if you take out the winners, well, yeah, the sector wasn't very good. But the key is to get into the winners. And when you do, they can more than outperform the rest of the losers. You can only lose one time your money. You can make 10 times or 100 times your money on the winners. And that's what actually happened. It just took a little longer. So I think the real tragedy is that Silicon Valley declared it a failure a little too early. And venture capital is a 10-year time period to really know whether you're any good at this. And that's what it really took 10 years later. It's a highly measurable industry. It's just that that measurement, the performance reviews for venture capitalists are sort of seven to 10-year time frames. And it turned out you guys found a bunch of those winners. Yeah, and as a result, we were able to spin out. As most of the industry bailed on it, we stuck to our conviction. And we spun out in 2017 and we formed G2, which is the same guys working on this for 10-plus years together. And we're going to keep doing it for the next 10 or 20 years. OK, great. Julia, after your Olympic medal in sailing, is that right? Sailing? Yeah. It was 30 years ago, Andrew. OK, so a couple of years after that, you got, you were as a consultant working on climate work, but then you got into climate investing after that first wave. So when you look back from a little bit more of a distance, what caused you to say, very early, compared to this current wave, what caused you and your partner Scott to say, yeah, this now is the time? Because in the Gardner hype cycle, there's this beginning, I'll do it from my perspective, but this beginning, very, very early period, that's a great time to invest. Then there's this peak, and that's a terrible time to invest. Then there's the trough of disillusionment, probably also a good time to invest. And that's what you're saying about G2VP came in at that trough point. On the second wave, you sort of came in early. What caused you all to believe and really know at the time that now is the time? I think in a nutshell, it is this very demonstrable convergence that we see clearly between government, business, finance, and consumer demand, to Tony's point. It's all converging and happening. And I want to tell you just a couple of things that I witnessed at the TED climate countdown, which was in October over in Edinburgh, across the Scotland peninsula from where COP was. And this was Vice President Al Gore's event leading up to COP. And there were a number of exciting movements there that I think demonstrate this. So from a government standpoint, we now have 90% of global greenhouse emissions covered under a net zero commitment. 90% of the world says, yes, we're going to do this by 2050 with 2030 goals intermediary. Business has said, to your point, I need these technologies. There's something called the First Movers Coalition that was formed with 30 leaders from the hard to abate sectors. And they've raised their hand to say, I need this. And I want to help bring down the green premium. This is Maersk and Volvo and United Airlines and Orsted. So those eight sectors that are really hard that we haven't quite figured out the solutions for yet, their corporates are raising their hand and saying, bring me these technologies. Finance, we all heard about the global financial alliance for net zero. That's $130 trillion worth of assets across every class, from asset managers to asset owners, insurers, banks. They have said, I'm in for net zero. And consumers, if you look at the Yale Climate Communication Center, we now have in America, which I think has been the laggard here compared to Europe, on attitudes. Over half of Americans say climate change is something that's alarming or concerning to me. And I believe we've caused it, and I believe we need to do something about it. So the tipping point has happened, I think, across all these sectors. And the movement is there. And start-ups are responding in a fantastic way. And yeah, I mean, 10 years ago, we would have never been able to get those names to step up and say, yeah, we want to be customers, bring it on. Not just consumers, but the big companies, the big businesses. One of the headlines out of COP26 was that the governments didn't quite sort of align on all the key issues, but business stepped up. Was that spin? I know businesses did step up, but was that just sort of a consolation prize because the governments couldn't pull it off? Or do you think businesses are going to play a much more expansive role moving forward? I think it's the latter. I think businesses that win are ones that see that this is a strategic advantage. And so the leaders are leading, and the followers will fall away. Brooker, Tony, what do you think? Are big businesses stepping in and going to be there for the long haul? Or if they're customers, I was talking to somebody at a big consumer packaged goods company, and one of the biggest, about regenerative farming. And they said, oh, yeah, we're all in on regenerative farming. I said, you told me that 10 years ago about organic, and you would have organic on labels for everything, and you were sourcing organic. Then consumers stopped being interested. You stopped making that organic mayonnaise that I used to buy, right? And that was because the consumer pull went away. So how committed is big business? I think one thing I noticed at COP is no one is denying climate change anymore, right? So ExxonMobil, the worst defenders in the world are calling for a price on carbon. So I think that's a big shift. But it does depend on consumers. I think if the consumer sentiment shifts, or again, that's why this is happening now is because people are paying attention to consumers or voters, like it's grassroots that cause these movements. So that has to continue for CEOs and businesses to continue this momentum. So from my point of view, I think there's a will, and they want to do this. They need to do a lot of learning and figuring out how to properly implement or test some things. So before it was kind of greenwashing sort of like, okay, we're gonna try some stuff, but they weren't really committed to it. Now they're saying we're gonna try things and we're gonna have to commit to something. So I still think we're figuring it out phase and they're gonna try many different things, but they know they have to commit this time. There's no more, you know, just hand waving. And so I still, you know, there's still gonna be the early adopters who are rushing and taking it on, but some of these big guys are still, you know, they're slow. They just, they are what they are, but it's a trend that isn't gonna stop. It's not gonna be like 2008. One other thing to mention, the underpinning and the really important part of this framework is accounting. And a major announcement was just made, so the International Sustainability Standards Board was created last month. That's a big deal. Accounting doesn't usually excite anybody or get them out of their chair, but if you're a business, you are now clear on how you account for sustainability. This merges all those acronyms that you've heard of, CDP and IFRS and GIN and PRI and you name it, into one body that says, okay, world, this is what matters, this is how you measure it, and you can't run away from that. So I think that's actually really critical. You're absolutely right. And when you see it and investors on the stock markets or whatever, you know, they just look at the numbers. And if that's a number that's there, those externalities are finally priced in. That's an amazing thing, because it's another metric that they have to optimize around. So after my flight yesterday, I was a little bit bloodshot eyes and tired. So of course I did what you do at Slush, which I learned on the way in. I'm my driver. I went to the sauna right away. My new best friend Daisy, when I walked in, she asked me within like five minutes, really tough questions about climate, which I wasn't expecting. I just wanted to sauna and to jump in freezing cold Baltic water. But after my third dip in the Baltic, I actually was able to start to converse with her about these big questions. And she said, who are the zero sum, is this a zero sum game and who are the losers? And so I'll just make it easy. Are oil and gas just screwed here? Are there categories of companies that literally like just can't get out of the hole that they've dug for themselves? You know, Chris James was a venture number one who was on the stage at TED with Ben Van Bearden of Shell. And he had a great quote, which was, you can't have a business whose strategy runs counter to society's goals. And I think in a nutshell, if you are producing something that produces emissions that you can't capture and sequester. And the world has said, this is where we're going, which the world has now very clearly said, I think you're in trouble. His point was we can innovate from the inside. I'm going to be an engaged manager here. And there's a lot of work to be done. But I think you have to be a progressive, future-looking, green hydrogen, clean fuels, certifying, migrating to renewables company if you're going to. We're getting the treasure map. That's good. Brooke, I'll give you two perspectives. So one is that generally we find that strategics and companies have a really hard time evolving. Like innovators dilemma, it's real. It almost never works that companies can evolve to the next chapter of technology in their industry. So I'm generally very skeptical. If you look at the math, though, of climate, we need to decarbonize every sector. But in every study, the IPCC, lots of different versions of this, you always end up with an extra tail here that you have to remove from the atmosphere. And just to put it in context, the global oil industry moves around today about five gigatons of material. That's what gets moved out of the ground and burned, ultimately. We have to take 10 gigatons out of the atmosphere and put it back underground or mineralized. So who's going to do that? Like literally, who's going to move those molecules around? And some of that has to be the same people that built the infrastructure to go the other way. And we just have to flip it in reverse. That's the opportunity, whether they can step up to the challenge or not, in the face of all of this economic challenge and running away from their profit centers. Super, super hard. But OK. Yeah. Well, it goes down to the management teams, as you were saying, and the boards. Are they really innovative? Are they really forward-looking? Most of these companies have been in maintenance mode. They've been maintenance mode. The CEOs just kind of watch over it for the investors. And they know how to do capital allocation on the things they know, not new things they do that are coming. The thing that's really interesting to me is the fact that if you look at a lot of the ways to do green chemicals, green fuels, these other things, it's actually cheaper for the infrastructure to build the infrastructure in the CAPEX for a lot of these new industries, or these transformational industries, than what it took to do the petroleum side stuff. So it's actually, you could actually make more money because the CAPEX is lower. And so that might be the perfect reason why these big companies might do it. It's like, oh my god, lower CAPEX, better margins. We just have to adopt those things. So I like the fact that, in a lot of cases, in the Petro to green world, the CAPEX can actually be lower. OK. All right. So I'm going to summarize so we can get on to the treasure map, which is going to lead everyone to great places to invest in. And also hopefully start amazing world-changing companies and make a ton of money in the process. What I learned is this time is different. There are a lot of different behavioral issues around the way consumers act, companies act, and now governments are finally maybe possibly acting. And then in the last one, I'm just going to summarize that you all said oil and gas is totally screwed. So I know I'm paraphrasing, but yeah. There is a zero-sum game. So let's talk about the treasure map. And we'll do this fairly quickly. But if you could just each explain areas that you feel, even in this possibly hyped, possibly like not even begun to be correctly sized in terms of market opportunity world of climate tech today, what are the early stage opportunities that you wish were getting more attention and more great founders? OK. I'm going to say circular economy. So 55% of the world's emissions come from energy, the systems, the transportation, the buildings. The other 45% comes from production of goods and food. We've got a very clear path around renewables for the 55%. We don't have the clear path on the 45%. So in partnership with abundant, clean, renewable energy, think of all the systems you can enable, the processes you can enable to collect, recycle, and reuse material. We can't keep extracting with the way we have in the past. So I would like to see more in each of those areas. We're doing this already with our partner Fortum here in Europe. But there's a lot more opportunity, particularly on the types of recycling for hard to recycle materials in plastics, for example. So that would be one. Awesome. Can I do a second one? Yeah, quickly. Yeah. I think we now recognize that nature and biodiversity are vital to our economy. WEF, Das Gupta, lots of reports showing this. Nobody's doubting that anymore. The way I've measured carbon accounting, like we co-invested in Sinai, I would love to measure biodiversity. What are the right metrics? What are these plants doing? How does it matter? And if I'm a company, how do I account for my biodiversity activity? So I think that would be my second one. Brooke, that's awesome. I'll give three ideas. So one is just to build on the circular economy. Our food system is broken. We need better ways of growing food. We're eating the wrong food. It's causing not only environmental damage, but a health epidemic as well. So interested in new ways of growing food. We've made a couple investments here over the years, and I think there's lots of work left to do there. The second area is autonomy. This is just we look for technology megatrends. This is a massive megatrend robotics, machine vision, very powerful technologies that can drive efficiency and manufacturing, supply chains, logistics. We've made some investments there. I think there's lots more work to do. And then the third, kind of the wild card area that I wouldn't have said six months ago is fusion. I'm actually kind of like, for once in my career, actually bullish on the prospects of fusion. I can't believe what I'm saying that. Cold. Okay, go, Tony. Okay, well, Julie, you had one of, that I was going to come up with is trash to treasure. We already, we've mined a lot of things. We just have to go mine our trash heaps. There is so much minerals, so many materials inside those trash heaps and the ones that we're producing today that we can go and take and circular. So for sure, trash to treasure. The other thing I'd like to see is innovation on the design side, on the life cycle side, for designers, for engineers, for industrial operations engineers, all these things, to really understand when you're making decisions today, tools to help them make better decisions. They want to make earth-friendly decisions. They want to make things that are better for their company, but they don't have a broad enough education on that. They don't have tools to help them and they do what they can with inside of their companies. So I want to see other, see startups come with solutions to bring tools to these large companies to help them make better decisions about what they're going to be doing in the future with their new products that they're producing. Okay, awesome. We have one last round here and I'll say for me, decarbonization of agriculture. So I spent a long time working on decarbonization of the energy sector. That's now doing really well and there will be trillions of dollars invested to complete that work. A lot of us have been investing in decarbonization of mobility. I know a lot of people here are working on that. That's going really well. We just hit 10% of all new EVs sold or electric. That's incredible and that will, that inflection point is now, I think, done and we're going to see it take over every corner of mobility. And I think next is a wave of decarbonization of agriculture and that's going to be a very exciting and highly investable space. Brooke's already backpivot bio, which is doing great work there. So now I'm going to do something totally unfair. We're going to do a lightning round where I'm just going to say words. I haven't really told them what the words are in advance and they're going to do a thumbs up or thumbs down on the word at all. So it's like, you know, Roman word association. You guys already from cold fusion. Everybody, it's not cold though, don't say cold. Okay, just fusion. Okay, okay, great. So 50-50, small modular fission reactors. Okay, 50-50, amazing. Venture capitalists are not a herd animal. I thought we would all be, okay, green hydrogen. Okay, fuel cells. Or what? Fuel cells for anything. Okay, that was a little... Okay, you could sort of be halfway, okay. Kelp, just going to say kelp. Sure. All right, we don't know any better. Bioplastics for, you know, sequestration. Okay, CO2 enriched or let's say decarbonized concrete and cement. All right, our first four thumbs up. Decarbonized synthetic fertilizers. Okay, first four. We won't need them actually, but. Yeah, okay. And then regenerative ag as a venture category. Regenerative agriculture as a venture category. As a venture category? Not just a good idea. That's up to the audience. You need to make it. I don't know. I won't say no, but I don't know if I like this. All right, so there you have it. I think we covered 10 different categories. They are very quickly totally unfair. I'm sure if some of you disagree with those, you should go to the people who said the opposite and change our minds. And if any of you are thinking about building climate tech companies, this is where the next trillion dollar opportunities lie. There is just a treasure map full of opportunity for all of you to build great businesses. And I hope you feel that the past is the past and that future is climate tech. So thank you very much. Thank you.