 Hello everybody and welcome. We've got some folks I can see in the back grabbing food and drink and so we will slowly get this started but I'd like to welcome everybody to the panel on investing in climate change innovation. We have some rock stars up here that I'm very excited about introducing to all of you and the agenda that we will go through today is we'll do about 10 minutes of quick intro with all of the panelists. We'll have about 20 or 30 minutes of questions where I will do my best to elicit some of the genius from this group and then we're gonna what's that? Good luck. We practiced and then we're gonna open it up to you guys and so I want this to be a dynamic dialogue and discussion and hopefully we'll get to some pretty exciting potential outcomes. What we would love everybody to come away with from this session is inspiration about what's happening in the climate change innovation space. There's a lot of doom and gloom out there but there's also a lot of positive exciting things happen and I think this panelist happening and I think this panel really represents that and I want you to go thinking how you can engage. So if we don't do that call us out on it tell us I want to be inspired and I want to be engaged but let's get started. That sound good? All right I see head nods. My name is Joe Spiker. I lead the Autodesk Foundation. How many folks are familiar with Autodesk? Whoa that's fantastic. So for those of you who are not we are a software company that we make software for people who make things. If you've ever admired a skyscraper, if you've ever ridden in a car, if you've ever used a smartphone, if you've experienced a special effect in a movie, you've experienced what our customers are doing with our software. Our foundation's mandate is to leverage corporate resources to create societal impact. So that's social impact and environmental sustainability through design and engineering tools and we are focused on climate change. That is one of the biggest challenges that we have as a society. If you think about how people make things and what they are making, we can make them a lot more sustainable and we can make much more sustainable things. So we'll talk about that more as the panel goes on but I'd like to ask each of our panelists to go ahead and introduce themselves. I'm Phillip Barnum, CFO of the Lemelson Foundation. Lemelson Foundation is a private family foundation headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Our founders Dorothy and Jerome Lemelson founded us 22 years ago. Jerry Lemelson was one of the most prolific inventors in US history. 604 patents among them of our technology, Sony Wackman 8-track tape. So we as a foundation are about invention and in the US that's really about how do we educate and inspire the next generation of inventors and in developing countries, our tagline is improving lives through invention. So I'm happy to say that through all across our portfolios, environmental issues, climate change is present. I'm happy to say that as a foundation, we've divested of fossil fuels and we've lowered the carbon footprint of our endowment. And on the grant side, every one of our grantees has to give us their environmental impact report. We funded things like inventing greens, so environmental issues and climate change pervade everything we do from the endowment all the way through all of our investments. Hi everybody, I'm Victoria Fram. I'm the co-founder and managing director of Village Capital. Village Capital is a system to find, train and invest in the highest potential entrepreneurs, solving what we called real world, real world problems. And those for us are defined primarily within two buckets, one around social and economic issues where we focus on affordable access to health care, education and financial services. And then a second bucket that's very relevant to our conversation here today around environmental sustainability and climate change where we focus on sustainable food and agriculture as well as energy. We have two parts to our operations. One is a venture development program that we run around the world and across those five sectors that I just named. They're three or four months long and will bring together 10 innovators that are working across each of those sectors. So 10 entrepreneurs in energy working together for three months. They're full time running a business and come together for four days at a time, three times. And we have a unique way in which we deploy capital, which is the second side of our business, that we do through a peer review and selection process. So we think entrepreneurs, those people who are closest to their customers and in the markets where they're working, should have a say in how we deploy early stage funding. And what we've found is that over time that mitigates a lot of the bias and outcomes that we're seeing in early stage funding overall. So we've done this program 50 times. We've made 80 investments through it. About 15 or so of those have been in energy directly related to climate change. And I'm excited to talk about some of them here today. My name is Melissa Yule. I'm the Chief of Staff at Elemental Accelerator. And I also work at an organization called Emerson Collective. But I'm going to be talking mostly about Elemental Accelerator. So we're a later stage accelerator program. We support companies in energy, water, transportation, agriculture, cybersecurity. We invest and co-deploy innovation technology on the ground, investing up to a million dollars. So we're unlike any other sort of accelerator or incubator out there in the space because we actually do projects with the company. We've invested in over 60 companies to date and deployed over $35 million to those companies. We're announcing our 2018 cohort. So go to our website, sign up for our newsletter and be the first to hear about who's joining the portfolio. We also practice something called place-based innovation. So what that means is we look at the problems of a specific place or community. We started in Hawaii. And so Hawaii has extremely high energy prices, a lot of abundant renewable resources, but the sort of utility structure is set up in a way that we're not actually utilizing all of the resources. So we work with utilities, PUC regulators, schools, businesses in order to bring in technology that is actually going to help folks on the ground. Great. So last but not least, I'm Nicole Systrom. I am the Director of Philanthropic Partnerships at Prime Coalition. We are a non-profit. Our mission is to empower philanthropists with the tools they need to invest in early stage, to invest charitable capital in early stage companies that could have an outsize impact on climate change. So we think of ourselves as really as a two-sided marketplace, innovators working on climate relevant technologies on one side and philanthropy on the other. And we really try and help the two sides speak to each other. One of the problems that we're responding to is just the really the huge capital gap that many entrepreneurs face in this space. So just a quick stat for you, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported zero initial investment in clean tech venture capital. So no new investments into new companies in Q2, Q3, and Q4 of 2016. Now, that doesn't cover everything. In fact, it doesn't cover Prime. But just as an order of magnitude, sort of scary. Prime has done, we facilitated six investments to date in early stage technology companies, which is about $15 million in capital investment capital that we've mobilized. There's 27 first time philanthropic investors included in that group. We're very, very proud of that. And just excited to be here on the panel today. Yeah, thank you guys. I think we this organization of folks is an amazing collection, brain trust, if you will, of people who are thinking about how do we innovate climate change? And I'm going to go a little bit off script here because we had discussed some questions, but a lot of the philanthropic capital to date in climate change is focused on policy and advocacy. And increasingly, you know, if you were a funder of advocacy around federal climate policy, you're pretty upset right now, particularly this week, about what's happening. And I think everybody here is thinking about this in a relatively new way, particularly on the solution side. So instead of the regulatory top down, how do we promote solutions? And increasingly, that's coming from the private sector. So I'm curious to hear from each of you guys. And maybe Nicole, we'll start with you. That shift of thinking in new ways about, you know, regularly speaking versus like, enterprise and innovation. How is that happening? And how quickly is it happening? Yeah, great question. So I answer from the like the philanthropy world philanthropy perspective. I guess the first thing to say is that there will always be a place for philanthropy to support policy advocacy. That's a great use of philanthropy. But at prime, we are really trying to help drive that trend. And I think the transition to focus also on supporting solutions is happening. We find that a lot of a lot of the funders that we work with are excited to work with us because they're new to the space. There's some sort of generational transition happening within their own philanthropy. Maybe maybe they've been funding policy advocacy forever, and they're frustrated by the sort of lack of progress. Maybe they're just getting really interested in impact investing. And so we're they come to us from that perspective that they really psyched about the sort of investment flavor of what we do. Oh, I think the transition is happening. We're helping build moment every deal we do gets a little bit easier to do. But I there's a lot of room to grow. I mean, all of climate philanthropy today from foundations is something absurd, like 1% of all philanthropy goes to climate related anything. So there's a heck of a lot of room to grow. And a lot of people on this panel are working on that for sure. Philip, you've been doing this for some time, despite your young years. So I think, you know, the foundation in the US has programs in K through 12 and university education. What we're really trying to do consistently is to embed environmental issues and climate in the educational programs. We have an issue we're talking about invention education and invention education we embed environmental issues in that. So we're really trying to say is, if you get the youth K through 12, and university folks who are already sort of wanted to know more about it, you embed it in that. So as a generation comes up, this isn't going to be an issue anymore. This is going for the young people. This is just something that is we're also last year, we ran a competition called inventing green. So we went to our grantees and said, can you come up with ideas that are educational and all sorts of sort to embed green issues and everything we do. So we've supported green chemistry, inventing green, we now have an inventing green toolkit so the teachers can use that. So I don't you know, we've also become for the first time ever in our history, we're talking about advocacy, and really being out there much more than we ever have been before in advocating for policy, what makes sense. And we actually don't use the term impact investing, we use the term investing because we see it as the investing for the 21st century. It's just you do it because it's the right thing to do. It's the best thing to do. We also in our university programs, that's all embedded. And in our investing with Village Capital and other folks, again, it's all embedded. So I think we've embedded it in everything that we do. Yeah. Yeah, and I think, from our perspective, philanthropic capital can be more risk tolerance and help to cross that divide. And I think, Nicole, that was a little bit what you were talking about and seeding the markets there, talking about K through 12 work. Victoria Melissa, as leading incubators and accelerators, I'm curious about what more besides capital do you guys bring to the space and how how that is helping to move it forward. So Victoria, let's start with you. Yeah, so our system that we surround entrepreneurs with in our programs is meant to sort of downplay the promise that they might get funding out of our peer review model. And we actually when we survey them and say, you know, why did you apply in the first place? Many of them will say at the beginning, because I thought I had a pretty good chance at getting an early stage check. And all of them at the end say, that was by far the least important part. And all of it was the community and the network and the resources that come out of the program. So recently, both last year and this year, and really excited to be working with Autodesk Foundation this year on our energy cohort, we've focused around transportation and logistics and the impact that that has on climate change, both from a energy delivery point of view. So how do we actually get energy to the places that it needs to go? And also with the energy toll that our transportation and logistics system puts on the environment. So I think a third of greenhouse gas emissions are related to transportation. So what that means for what we do in the programs is have people on our advisory board and who come to mentor who are the chief sustainability officers from Walmart and UPS and a variety of other really big businesses that back to your sort of regulatory question, we're relying on big businesses and the economic choices that they are faced with, leading us all to a path that will be more sustainable. So as costs come down for more sustainable sources of energy, we're seeing people no longer make sort of a heart driven choice, but an economic driven choice that they realized that it's actually, you know, the dollars and cents of their bottom line are dependent on the finding more cost effective ways to doing things. And by the way, that also means things that tend to be better for the environment. So we can talk about a couple of the models that have ensured that but we really think about in terms of more than money surrounding entrepreneurs with the resources that they need to think about scaling their businesses, not just with capital, but with human resources and strategic advice and connections within their own existing supply chain that will help them scale a lot more quickly. Yeah, that I couldn't agree more. That's what our model is as well. It's the building the ecosystem around the entrepreneur. A lot of times the companies come to us not looking for capital, as you say, but looking for connections. We have partnerships with global utilities from all over the world. And those are really important because in order to enter a partnership with a utility, it looks different. No one knows where the front door is. People are coming in through the window. And so start up that that's really hard. I mean, they're they're cash stressed and stressed by other issues. So when you can sort of bridge that relationship gap, it's really important. But I also wanted to talk about relation and policy. I mean, we're talking about on the maybe global or national level, but what we do a lot for our companies is work around policy and regulation on hyper local level or the state level even, which is where a lot of energy and water policy gets made. And so, for example, one of our companies stem does distributed energy management. They put batteries and buildings and help them bring down their peak load, but also turn over that suite of batteries to to the utility to use as a distributed energy resource. And that was a framework that wasn't available under the current regulatory landscape in Hawaii. And we actually worked with stem and the PUC to pass that rate case. And what's so interesting about stem is that they're very focused on policy because, you know, policy picks, winners and losers, no matter what. And their whole approach was to create a framework that allowed more than themselves to be able to compete in the market because they said that every viable market has at least two competitors. We also work with our companies on battery storage permitting. And so this is like as granular as going to like a 20 person Department of Planning and permitting meeting super, you know, in the books about changing the building code. But that actually greases the wheels and accelerates the permitting process for a lot of our energy storage companies. And so it's getting in the weeds, getting really close to to the problem that that that we see really makes a difference on the ground. And from them from the entrepreneur and market perspective of how do we unlock this? Nicole, would you add anything in your role from Cyclotron Road in terms of the support of entrepreneurs? I also work with another program, a early stage fellowship program for hard science entrepreneurs called Cyclotron Road. And in addition to a lot of just kind of the bread and butter networking support that these ladies work on every day. Cyclotron Road is also focused on helping those really early stage entrepreneurs find the lab resources they need to do really hard R&D. That stuff is really also difficult to get funded these days and difficult to an expensive to pay for, especially if you're an early stage company. But I would I mean, I'd echo a lot of what they said. I mean, one of the one of the things that we stress, even at the very early stage and at Cyclotron Road companies have gone on to Elemental and, you know, hopefully we'll go to Village Campus someday. But even at the very early stages that connection to industry players, big industry players helping them think through, helping our entrepreneurs think through where their technologies could play and making sure that they're developing something someone wants to buy someday. So let's talk about the inspiration parts. And Phillip, let's start with you. What are some of the best opportunities that you see in the funding space for supporting climate change innovation? Ignore the current administration. I think for for us, it's really we become a lot more public than we ever have been before. Yeah. I mean, when we join the divest, invest, that's probably the first time we've ever gone public. We've been at this since 2006. So I think our board felt very strongly that we need to be out there and inspire other foundations to divest and reinvest their endowments. So a lot of foundations still say, you know, we're going to make a mess over here, but our grants don't worry we're going to clean it up. So for us, we wanted to inspire foundations. And again, we also want to inspire more foundations to go really early. We go pre prototype. We go very early. We also try to be very catalytic with our funds. We'll come in and place the CFO will place will do alone will do so really getting people to try different things to help these companies because I think we need to inspire the folks out there that these companies are worth investing in, bring corporate players in, bring in other philanthropies and other foundations who really are still looking at market rate returns. So I think a lot of what we do is trying to be catalytic and be inspirational for the industry to help other people. I mean, that's really one of the reasons why I went into Village Capital very early on. We wanted to show people that funds like Village Capital can be successful. So we've done that a number of funds. So we tend to go in first or second as an inspiration to everyone out there to say you can do it. It's a good thing to do. And also I'm really lucky because our board is very embraces or a long-term investor. We also will embrace risk. So it's also inspiring other people. You know that's what philanthropic capital is all about. I mean that's why we're out there. You've inspired us. We have a co-investment that we're terrified of but you guys take the long-term view and de-risk it. I'll be there all the way. Oh, is that a commitment? Yes. So we also de-risk a lot for people. So you know. Co-investors as therapists. Good model. Yeah, well we'll take your house first. Victoria. So as I mentioned we take a very broad view of how we can sort of impact climate change. I would say that you know we're a small early stage fund and I think oftentimes people have a bit of an intimidated view to like the scale of this gigantic problem that we're all facing as a planet and the perception that most energy investments are so capital intensive that how could I actually make an impact at the early stage. So we're focusing on innovations and enterprises where we see some amount of capital efficiency and certainly you know we're not going to be the only ones that write them a check and we will look for PRI philanthropic sources or you know non-dilutive use to exist some amount of government funding we hope won't disappear entirely but in the last four or so investments we've made we have been one piece of a an overall funding picture that has been complemented by DOE funding and other PRIs and then commercial sources of capital. Some of the to get a little bit more specific about sort of the energy transportation nexus that's meant we've invested in companies like idle smart out of Kansas City that has hardware and software solution to reduce the fuel that's wasted as trucks spend a an inordinate amount of time idling and wasting fuel to keep their drivers comfortable overnight or while they're on the road so they have a governor that now helps drivers better manage that idling time reducing the overall fuel waste of the truck but also bringing their truck lines on line much more of the time because they're not doing cold starts in frigid conditions in you know at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. again one of those things that trickles down to the bottom line of the business or a micro combined heat and power distributed solution that's based out of Houston Texas called Trigen that helps sort of integrate the renewable sources of energy with grid sources and can be an on-site power generation innovation that incidentally was super useful to people in Houston post Harvey when even if they weren't flooded the substations around them were offline and they had no source of power so we're seeing a lot of these things kind of not only try to preempt the climate change problems so mitigate what we've already created but also be a source of adaptation and resilience when people get into what is increasingly terrifying the number of natural disasters that we've had over the last few weeks and month even yeah and no one has a face mask on here but I just had something so you use the term PRI a PRI is a program-related investment so fan for those of you are not foundation folks pure eyes are way that we can invest equity debt we have a wide variety of tools that we can invest in funds and companies that can really go a long way to support funds we have in the US we have a broad array of tools we can use we've used those in India we use them all over the world and again it's one of our tools using philanthropic capital into funds with equity that we can move markets along and we've done that a lot and again we would find you know if we've done it other people can do and we'd inspire them to use it but that's what a PRI is. Yeah thank you for that. Yeah I mean I would definitely say the creative work that Prime is doing Bill Cap and Lemelson Foundation are doing around driving investment and funding into energy innovation and demystifying sort of the misgivings about it is really great I'm gonna take a different text so what what we do besides funding and the network thing is I think we also try to tell a story and wrap a story around the entrepreneurs that brings somewhat like hard to understand technical sort of like behind the meter really utility not sexy stuff to you know ten folks so that people can actually understand how these innovations are impacting their day-to-day so so we help the entrepreneurs a lot with storytelling we also do is I think we create a culture in the corporations that we work with and the global utilities that is not afraid of innovation and not afraid of failure and when you're in the Bay Area failure is you know fine but to the rest of the world I think it's it's still a foreign concept. We actually create a little competition a feeling of competition a friendly competition among the corporates and the utilities that we bring together we convene them a couple times a year and in talking to each other and trading stories about issues that they're facing in terms of adapting to a transforming grid and energy structure we sort of put them on the spot and and ask them to to talk about how many investments they've made in energy innovate innovation companies how many pilots they're doing you know what what's the trajectory for that and we've seen actually through this really innovative sort of new program called pre-electrons that we're partnering with Cal staff and and several other organizations is that when you put utilities on the spot they want to out do each other in terms of how innovative they are and it's a really funny way to gamify the business the process of getting business so we're trying to get creative like that very cool and I want to come back to some of the place-based stuff that you guys are both talking about but Nicole what's the most what are some of the most inspiring opportunities you see in terms of philanthropic opportunities to investment opportunities investment opportunities well I guess the sort of general point I would just make is there are a lot of companies out there working on climate innovation prime looks at this year we looked at 2100 like they're just a ton so there are definitely companies out there a couple of specific examples from companies that have made it on our docket one of them is called opus 12 they are their technology changes co2 waste stream into high value chemicals and the sort of long-range vision of that is our fuel that is carbon neutral so things like that I think are really exciting if I had to say two other things I think just philanthropic opportunities there's a lot of opportunity to to juice up the connection among the different ecosystem players I think around climate and innovation and sort of one specific example of that is I think we could all benefit from more connectivity between the different types of funders so like if you're a software company and you're in Silicon Valley like you know I've heard seed stage like here are the seed funds I'm gonna talk to these seed funds and then and then I kind of march down Sand Hill Road and I talked to this funder and that funder and then you know there's a path to get to scale I think in the climate change space we well a there's room for different types of funding models but there's definitely room for philanthropy to help these ecosystem players talk to each other better so that we all all all different kind types of funders can kind of gain confidence that someone's coming down the line to help get that entrepreneur to the to the level of impact we want them to have and then and then if I had the back way up if policy advocacy is your thing there's a lot of room to fund policy advocacy around innovation and R&D and that is I think that is one of the a lot of climate policy focuses on you know very sort of high level stuff and then we end up with a clean power plan that can get thrown out but I think R&D sort of early-stage innovation funding that's that's a bipartisan idea and still has a lot of momentum behind it yeah I have I have one exciting that actually was a result of an interaction at Cyclotron Road's demo day where it's very self-serving but there was an organization called Cal Wave and I met the founder I was familiar with it in your docket companies and they said oh I think we owe our existence to you guys we've never given them a dollar but we funded the as me I show which is a hardware competition globally they won the as me I show that gave them their first funding to put up a website and fly some folks around and then we gave them a software donation and they said they were able to use that to unlock an RPE grant yeah so like which to me is the highest and best use particularly of corporate philanthropy is like to like you were saying to leverage other opportunities and I thought it was so valuable I think all the work that you guys are doing is incredibly valuable and de-risking and unlocking this space to a significant degree Victoria and Melissa you guys are both talking you know you have unique geographic perspectives Nicole just mentioned San Hill Road the majority of funding in innovation goes to three states I've read Ross's book or it's actually I'm reading Ross's book but I wonder if you guys can talk a little bit about some of the opportunities in terms of place in geography and where folks aren't looking yeah so the one of the statistics that that yeah one of the things that we pay a lot of attention to is that the way that venture dollars are being allocated today we think is likely doing all of us a great disservice not just in the diversity of thought that we're getting to get solutions on the table but also on the impact that we're able to have because people who are experiencing a bunch of problems that we want to solve actually are not getting a shot at actually you know getting the capital or resources that they need to try to solve them so 75 percent of venture dollars goes to just three states in the US California New York and Massachusetts 90 percent of our investments are outside of those three markets so and that's including our global scale I think that 75 percent number goes to 50 percent if you're looking at all venture dollars globally so we locate the programs that we run in places where we think we'll be able to leverage some of the strategic assets that are already based there in making some of these connections getting people access to customers and so forth so that's meant holding energy work that we've done in places like Houston where there's a lot of traditional oil and gas mentality that is slowly trying to shift to think about how they incorporate more sustainability in energy harvesting and distribution or Fort Collins Colorado where there's a lot of innovative research being done and a couple key partners of ours that have been helpful in in pushing our work forward what that has meant for how we think about sourcing innovation is is also outside of those key markets and we've been lucky to do some work internationally with Lemelson around invention and hardware that has led to some really interesting energy investments for us and again I think one of the key things we've learned there is that access Nicole mentioned you know lab access on the hard science side access to just basic tooling and machinery equipment is so much more scarce in emerging markets than it is here and so we were lucky to work with both Lemelson Foundation and Gearbox in Nairobi to put a hardware cohort of innovators together again thinking about like what are what assets are there locally that we can leverage to try to get people who have an idea and just need a little bit of support to get that idea to fruition the difference between them making it and not geographies for innovation is something that we're challenging ourselves with right now I mean Hawaii I think is not a place you think of that would attract a ton of entrepreneurs but if you if you add the right ingredients and start up I think you can create that environment right now though we are focused actually on California and this is part of our work with the Emerson Collective so really focusing on communities that are most affected by climate change that are being left behind in this transition to new economies and so really interested in how do we attract innovation technology to places like East Palo Alto or Stockton or others that are right next door to some of the most innovative cities in the world but are yet the people the communities are not experiencing the same fruits of that economic growth and so our challenge right now is to look for high growth entrepreneurs who who are really bringing clean energy solutions to market but who also have the capacity to deploy them in places that are not likely and but at the same time could benefit the most from them so for example one of our companies Free Wire they recycle second life Nissan leaf batteries they put them together in a pack and they put them in a robot and you can deploy them to charge electric vehicles and that negates the necessity of actually drilling holes in the ground and building charging infrastructure so it's a lot cheaper it also opens up the ability for renters who might not have one of those plugs in their home for renters to have access to energy charging resources and Free Wire can also use their technology as a replacement to diesel gensets which are used a lot on site for food trucks or small businesses or construction and so on on the micro scale that replacing a diesel dirty diesel gensets that is not regulated at all there is no restrictions on how dirty that can be with something clean like this can really improve life on a hyper local scale and so we're looking for companies where their value proposition is can be realized in unlikely places and starting in California can I I think incubators accelerators are like such super great vehicles for local kind of point of view and I just to maybe put someone on the spot I see Ben Gaddy from clean energy trust in the audience so he's clean energy trust is another great group that is focused on midwestern energy innovation so just another shout out there yeah I think there's a big theme here on driving local innovation I do want to open it up to questions and I actually didn't get oh we've got a mic going on and we've got a couple of hands coming up to right here I'll let the microphone hi there Chris Page from Seattle I'm wondering if you all have any thoughts either known examples or hypothetical examples of investing in accelerating the retirement of coal plants in the US not from a policy standpoint because I don't think we're going to get anywhere on the federal level there but just from the standpoint of a lot of wind and solar is becoming is rich grid parity but a lot of these coal plants are midlife they have another 15 years left have you seen examples of people putting together investment structures to retire coal plants or is that talking about yeah and actually why don't we take a couple of questions why don't you get the gentleman behind and then we'll aggregate responses from this team thanks Adam Flint from the New York Energy Democracy Alliance we're working on putting together a national fund to support community shared solar projects in four or five states that would contribute to being able to bridge the access gap for low and moderate income communities and communities of color and I realize I've walked into a panel that's talking about investing in for-profit companies so I'm wondering is that a fine and bright line in your world do you find that your focus right now because of the fact that we are experiencing a rather insane administration right now in policy is that having a greater impact in shifting towards the for-profit sector or is it simply a question of finding innovative solutions wherever they may be arising and let's we'll do two questions each and then another round so panelist responses retiring coal plants and low-profit investments so we haven't done anything ourselves in retiring coal plants but I was just speaking to a co-investor and there been a me from Kennedy group who is working on retraining former coal miners in West Virginia to install solar so I don't know what that means for what happens to the 15- year remaining life of the plant but at least you know there's not just an energy issue around it but also an employment one that I think if people start to see that it's not the end of their livelihood if they stop working at a coal plant that hopefully there's some gradual shift around the regional openness to saying we have much cleaner and now cost competitive sources of energy we only support for-profit companies because we want to see them some day stand on their own although I think the the blending of for-profit nonprofit is really necessary and an interesting and we actually have come across several companies that have a nonprofit arm that does a little bit of a different kind of work but then on the other on the other side they they have a for-profit business and I think that probably something that you're going to see a lot of under one roof with my other hat they do a lot of for-profit nonprofit support especially in this area that I think is a really great solution. So I would say we do both I mean we're you know we invest in companies but we also invest in nonprofits and particularly if you're using grant funding for something that's very early stage or maybe it's a different concept we would use grant funding and many times that goes to a nonprofit so we would sort of look at what the need is and the tool that we have to use so we wouldn't sort of discriminate either way I mean it would depend on a fund of course their for-profit but we do a lot of non-profit work and the only work we've done in coal we've studied carbon capture to see if that's really a viable way to capture the carbon produced by some of the coal plants that's something new for us I think we're still looking at it there's a lot of people say it doesn't work but I think the study would indicate that it could be financially feasible to do that so that that would be our only role in kind of carbon you know coal fire power plant. I think on the coal question it was interesting you're mentioned about employment and I think that's what's driving a lot of the policy decisions right now around employment in the coal industry interestingly enough and generation investment management has a philanthropic arm and they just released a paper transforming finance that talks about the role of the workforce in a low carbon future and it's really interesting reading talk about how we need to actually transform our workforce and it's not from the AI automation future that everybody's typically talking about it's from a low carbon perspective and I think it's great. New York Times also did a great article last weekend training coal fires for solar installation. So I would also add that our founder 25-30 years ago his whole thesis was that America wasn't being creative it wasn't making anything anymore it wasn't creating jobs does this sound familiar? So I think what we're trying to do now is say that yes we agree and we what we would like to do is bring have America manufacture goods that don't have a carbon footprint their environment responsible the climate change so but that's the 21st economy and we would say that that's our whole thesis getting America back to work however back to work with these kinds of industries so I mean that's how we're trying to blend make our message more acceptable in this interesting world. The undercurrent here is the entrepreneurship try shopper and you're incredibly good at euphemistically undercutting federal policy. It's called sneak. Well I mean it's the whole thing was we're trying to figure out given the current administration's you know influence how can we craft our message yeah to sort of be acceptable it's like we've done the same thing in India where India the Modi government is very fond of coal power power plants so a lot of clean energy and clean tech companies are now saying it's not only about clean energy it's about livelihoods job creation poverty alleviation so it's like how do you how do you get your products under the radar when you have a governmental administration who's not favorable inclined so it's like yeah nobody can argue with innovation and job creation like that's uncontroversial so we have a couple questions yeah we've got one in the back and one in front. Yeah my name is Paul Stevers and Brookings is research showing that one of the best investments again climate change is girls education and so it seemed to me that that any any serious talk about climate change should include that. What are you guys been thinking about innovations and accelerating girls education across the world. And we'll take one more question and then you're up next sir. Christopher Phillip I'm the e-learning director for the Climate Institute in Washington we've had some work with the tribes there are 400 excuse me 562 sovereign nations that have among them the best wind power regime in the upper Great Plains and the best solar regime in the southwest they have their own companies sacred power and the Navajo and Ho-Chunk Winnebago in the Great Plains and I'm wondering if you've had any efforts to work with developing companies that are in fact sovereign nations on our own soil thank you. Great question that's a first question. I can speak to the whole women in an innovation question or women in climate change so we have actively tried to recruit female entrepreneurs and we put our finger on the scale when we select companies. We also host an internship program where we fund 10 interns to work with our startups and we heavily try to recruit for young female high school students and college students to get them access to renewable energy or innovation jobs. I think that exposure and seeing more female role models in innovation and energy innovation is a great way to bump the numbers up. As you say we also have a focus on we have a program in Africa that's really about letting young women know that they can have careers in science and technology and that you know that's a program that really say this is an opportunity you can be included and we also have that emphasis in the U.S. particularly around female entrepreneurs and engineers and scientists and really in fact our board chairs are on foundation where it's really about bringing young women into the system particularly homeless young women and letting them know that they can have careers in science and engineering and technology so it is a side for us also. And speaking from Autodesk's perspective in terms of like STEM and STEAM education the there's a lot of research to suggest that if you want to get more women involved in these STEM STEAM careers make it more impactful. Basically focusing on the social and environmental outputs of engineering tools and actually there's a woman named Lena Nielsen formerly of Berkeley who's done a lot of research around this around engineering programs that have social and environmental aspects have a much higher rate of women in programs than men and so I think that's a lot of what we're talking about today and I think by virtue of some of the work you would see higher gender diversity in the work. With regards to the question around sovereign nations of the United States I learned something from that question that I did not know about and would welcome the opportunity to learn more. We do work with an organization called Catapult Design that does do a lot of work with the Navajo Nation and a few other sovereign nations of the United States and but does anybody have anything to add to that? I did not I was not aware of. Yeah we haven't we haven't directly but this is a good thing for me to think about so thank you. Yeah questions? We've got an enthusiastic questioner. Thank you. Thanks for mentioning about adaptation resilience. I work in the mutibond industry which is the primary industry right now responsible for dealing with funding adaptation called rising sea levels. The primary area where that type of adaptation gets stuck it's what we call pre- development costs. Minibonds are great for long-term project finance. Our industry is terrible at financing entitlements and design. It takes to get entitlements and that's where projects get stuck. There's adaptation projects for rising sea levels and most of the major metropolitan areas of the country and a lot of them are really stuck right there. The question for this group is would you consider expanding your horizon to turn or call it pre-development investment and adaptation infrastructure into impact investing? So let me I mean for us you know because we're about invention we come in very early. I mean a lot of our programs fund ideas infrastructure. I mean we find it really necessary to work with the inventor entrepreneur very early on to get them to the point where they even have an idea that could come to Village Capital so I think that's what we're all about. We have several. We have a program at LMIT. We have a several venture well program. That's a university program that's really about how do you surround the inventor the entrepreneur with what they need to get there. So we have funded research, we funded prototyping, we funded. So I think we're one of the few in addition to Autodesk that will go that early and fund very early from an idea forward. So we haven't done that. I would just say there are a couple it's of examples of in the philanthropic world where I think that sort of speak to this question. The super classic one is OPIC and the I don't remember it's like the African overseas private investment corporation. Yeah but it's like the African Development Fund or something. Basically the OPIC the overseas private investment corporation works. I think it's a pseudo federal agency. It is a federal agency and they were having a similar problem where they want to invest in large utility projects renewable energy utility projects in Africa. But no one was willing to fund that first kind of project development. You know the little bit of money you need to get your environmental surveys and do your initial sort of and so they partnered with some major philanthropies to put up some some philanthropic but investment capital to fund that early work. So there are there are models for what you're talking about for sure. I would just add that for us that's usually grant capital or we've worked in India for a number of years and we use service agreements we use we've created technical assistance pools so for us that's pre-investment money that would be grant money that would be sure. And I imagine you are familiar with Rockefeller Foundation's resilience cities initiative and yeah. I'm just putting on my Autodesk hat as well as the Autodesk Foundation. We do design software for civil engineers and are very familiar with the constraints in the space and a lot of it has to do with particularly in big infrastructure projects around a lack of investment in productivity enhancing tools. And it's really structural and due to the nature of the industry in itself of the boom and bust cycle and the time horizons that tend to exceed the business cycle. And so it's much easier to lay off an individual than it is to you know amortize the cost of the simulation software that you paid for five years ago right. And so what's interesting is is there's there's a couple of things happening that would change that. One of them is the rise of of basically automation and AI that can do things much cheaper you don't have to invest all of that up front capital in the simulation capability because now everybody's on the cloud and infinite computing power so there's some indicators to suggest that things change within the industry. We we care about adaptation as much as we care about mitigation. The problem with adaptation is that everybody defines it differently. Even Rockefeller 100 million cities you can hire CRO and it's purely on social resilience right versus C level rise. And so it makes it really challenging to have a very specific thing and I like how you put it this is an infrastructure issue there's a really cool kind of lighthouse example funded by Rockefeller here in the Bay Area called resilient by design and you might be familiar with this. Ah okay so we got so we got to where you were leading us yeah and we are a technology partner of RBD and are actually looking to do some grant funding for some of the projects but it's a really interesting and I'll speak for you you can correct me. It's a really interesting example. Rebuild by design was an adaptation project that was done with HUD housing and development and Rockefeller many years ago after Superstorm Sandy came through New York. HUD wanted to do something more interesting with the funds to build back better and so they partnered and it resulted in 10 projects around New York and New Jersey to improve the infrastructure for climactic events in New York and New Jersey. Here in the Bay Area we're actually doing the I would call prevention as opposed to treatment and preparing for sea level rise and Rockefeller has funded in conjunction with RBD to do look at how do we deal with the rising sea levels before it starts happening and hopefully this will act as a catalytic kind of lighthouse example of oh man we should be thinking about this and it's happening in municipalities all over this has got a lot of teeth to it and the ability to jump to a higher level. Any other questions? Oh we've got a couple in the back yeah let's take two in the back. I think this will be our these are our last two questions. Hi guys, great panel, thanks. So I want to ask about the future of investing in this sector if you can call it that because even just given all the questions that have been asked there have been so many different issues that have been touched that climate change I think is as expansive a category as impact investing because you've got you know deep tech heart science stuff you've got education you've got agriculture these are all super urgent industries and where there's a huge impact on climate so how do you mobilize more people to take up this banner because tons of people are already doing investing in those areas and how do you gather them under this tent? We'll take we'll take the last question. Louis Paul again just to follow up I wasn't thinking about just a couple people doing some innovation like for example if you educate a girl through grade 12 they have half the number of children so if the UN could actually implement what they're doing they'd have two billion less people by 2045 so if you look at the numbers the number one thing you got to do is educate girls and unbelievably mass scale and what are you thinking about that? The question is so to Jean's question we have a ringer in the audience okay what the question was how do we inspire more and the second time this question was a following question say should you be investing in climate innovation or should you be investing in educating women because we'll have a much lower population by mid- century yeah okay so to respond to Jean and maybe a little bit to the gentleman as well I would say let me pick about something Melissa talked about I think as in general the climate funding climate investing community is really great at talking to among itself we like to talk to each other a lot and what we have to do is get much much better at telling the story to other types of funders speaking to some of these issues you raise around you know women and girls educating young young women and all the benefits that has for climate but also for lots of different things I also think from prime's perspective there's a real role for intermediary groups to play and kind of network groups to play especially when you're trying to make investments in things that require a lot of expertise it's very hard for anyone individual investor to kind of get smart on everything so building more organizations that can be those trusted third-party experts to help channel funding and investment opportunities I think that's been a really successful model for us and there's no reason why what we do can't you know get expanded to other sorts of impact metrics as well I was going to say we did an interesting exercise for one of our board members a couple of months ago and he said we're not funding any climate so we went through our portfolio of companies and pulled out things that we had we had turned to the agriculture and the rest of them and surprise surprise so many of those are about using less water using less fertilizer using less diesel using less so we went across the companies and pulled out things that we wouldn't necessarily say were climate but you know one was a company in India that's doing a refrigeration system for trucks that lowers dramatically the amount of diesel and if you've been to India you've seen the thousands of trucks that's a major impact and we would have put it in another bucket but we went through a portfolio so to answer your question even though it looks like ag yeah it has a dramatic effect on climate like I said less water less fertilizer less this this this in higher productivity with livelihood so you're balancing lowering the carbon footprint and increasing the livelihood and again it was amazing how many of the companies we invest in have that overlay even though you wouldn't think that yeah I would totally agree I I mean I think it's a little bit of like code switching and the language that we use and I think you know with with our president now we stopped using the word climate change and started using the word resiliency and economic impact yeah economic impact and infrastructure and stuff like that so I think we all know what we're talking about when when we say you know this this will reduce the number of like resources you need to use on your agricultural plot but what we really mean is that that therefore you know you're not using it as much fertilizer therefore you're not like running plants as much to produce that fertilizer therefore you're not spitting carbon into the atmosphere therefore you're not impacting climate change so I think that we can just get creative in the way that we speak to different groups but I'll have the underlying goal yeah I think just to Gene's question we are good at talking to each other and I think there are still gaps in each of our ecosystems about where entrepreneurs what the entry points are and where they sort of graduate into in terms of capital so for me we are trying to focus on like continuing to do the piece that we think we have established expertise in and trying to do that well but making sure that we are talking to the venture well programs and knowing where innovation is coming so that we're sort of ready to meet it and then can accelerate it into the next stages of capital that it needs to be met with and I think that sort of getting clear about what stage you can play in and then making sure your connections are as strong at either end of the other links of the chain are hopefully what will move everybody along in the tent that's big enough and to the question about girls education education is one of the other sectors that we work in and there's has been mentioned a lot of interplay between those it is not it has not been a specific focus on girls education but I hear your point loudly and take note of that as one of the you know SDG or you know main goals under moving climate and I think that's where again we need to think about how does philanthropy if that in and of itself as a tenant to moving climate change hasn't made it into our investment thesis as like how do we find for-profit enterprises that are achieving that goal and getting to the impact we want then how do we work with the right pools of philanthropic capital that can achieve that goal since we're working towards the same end I would just add that I was in a session yesterday with a lot of funders foundations government people together and I think given the current governmental administration it's forcing us for better for worse to work together more to see what's having what's having to the budget how can we play a role so a lot of these things kind of don't drop so if us ad pays can't fund something can we fund something another foundation so I think I mean we're seeing a lot more collaboration because foundations traditionally have not played well together but I think we're finally starting to see if we're going to move the needle we've got to move in a collaborative effort much more and in we work in India for the last 15 20 years and I think for the first time ever we're seeing a lot more synergy among players a lot more cooperation I mean a lot of funders several foundations are funding with village capital that we fund and so I think you're seeing a lot more collaboration that I think is really encouraging and a lot of what comes out of it is clean energy clean tech type investment because I think we see that as a future so I'm not usually optimistic but I think we are seeing you know what can I say but I think we are seeing a move in the right direction I would add two quick things that I would agree with everything that everybody said and were way out of time but I think we have to demonstrate impact I think that that's such a way to bring more traditional funders into the space by showing that yes these design and engineering hardware solutions are delivering significant impact and that potentially a dollar invested in one of these could yield more than the farther you know service delivery models that are farther downstream I would also add two to your point about the current administration inspiring action we feel that palpably as a company so as the corporate donor up here the executives on our C-suite are saying what more can we do because suddenly the government is not taking care of the social welfare and we need to do more which is unfortunate but it's also a great thing so thank you all I see other people coming in I appreciate you guys how coming thank you to this panel it's been a wonderful discussion and I think we're here for a few minutes to discuss thank you