 What an introduction. It's beautiful. Hey, guys. So we are climate VCs. So we're climate VCs. We're positive VCs, which is even better, because we're here to talk about climate positive investment. And so, David, why did you go up to investing in climate? Yeah, so I'll tell you that. So I was worrying about climate like everyone else like 10, 15 years ago. And then I forgot about it because I was really busy running my company. And that was a success in some ways. And then what I really liked about running my own company was that I had a lot of different teams doing cool shit. And I could run around to them and talk to them and inspire them and give them money to do more shit. But also, I liked Unity as a very strategic company. There's a grand strategy to running Unity. We're engaging with all the platforms and the devices and the developers and all the different stuff. And I loved that grand strategy. So when I came out of Unity, I was doing angel investing. And I was investing in all these little teams. And I got the team kick, just talking to those clever people. But there was no grand strategy, because every startup was like a different thing, and they were all cute and awesome. But I missed that. And then I was investing in a lot of companies. And I came across somebody who was actually already a friend, Pia Henrietta, of Carpaculture. And friends were investing in her companies. So I just kind of invested with them. I wasn't really thinking too much about what she was up to. But then she and a few other climate founders, climate tech founders I met and invested in, started educating me about the problem, which I knew a little bit about, and the solutions, which I knew almost nothing about. And I found it so damn inspiring and fun. And I'm almost embarrassed by how fun it is working. Because in climate, there is a grand strategy. Everything is connected to absolutely everything. And so I basically got a kick out of it. Then I realized that I should focus my life a bit. And I decided to build an actual venture fund so we could deploy way more money than I would otherwise have. And when you thought about that, with your experience of being a founder, and so therefore VC funded, did you just go for going plain vanilla VC classic? Or did you not have anything from your VC experience that you really wanted to change? Yeah, so I really am one of those people that had a very good experience with venture capital. I've had fantastic partners, Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake, the best of the best, DHA, awesome partners. And when I was disaligned with my investors, it was on over minor things. And more than half the time, they were right anyway. So I learned to kind of love that, really. And as we were thinking about, so what I did mention is that in my angel investing, I invested in like 20 climate tech companies, from small reactors to new materials, biotechnology, and all these interesting things. So I got to know tens of founders, and as the team is getting together, we talked over 100 climate founders in the last six months. And we came to believe that the current VC model is pretty damn good. And it's also very sellable to the institutional money holders. So the conclusion is yes, let's extend the timeline of the fund a little bit to 12 years instead of 10 plus extension. But otherwise, break through energy ventures. They're doing 20-year funds. And we looked at it, and we're like, that's just a number. Like, who's going to sit around for 20 years anyway? We don't have 20 years to solve the crisis, right? So that's sort of, yeah, so far we're going for something quite vanilla. I know you're not, so I really want to hear how you got into this and how you're doing it. And maybe we'll eventually copy you. But yeah, that's where we are. Yeah. How about you? How did you? So me and the in the grand scheme of things. Because you've actually been a VC for a while. I've been a VC for 21 years, so that's a long time. So I've seen kind of the limits of the VC model in all these times. And limits were pretty fun because the first slim inside experience was that we were not integrating digital tools within the way we were doing venture. And even digital culture or community-driven things. And it took a while, actually, for the VC industry to integrate all that. That's over. So this is my first fund, basically, was all about that. How can we integrate and kind of adapt the VC model to the digital transition? What I see now is that the transition we're living is not only about climate take. It's basically a complete transformation of the economy that's going on towards a responsible zero economy, which is way deeper than what we've seen on digital even. And it's driven like digital transformation by people that changing their conceptions, habits, they're changing their requirement for work, looking for purpose in their work, changing also where they want to put their money, making sure their money is not harming society or the planet. And so it's really this change driven by people. And this wave of transformation is like digital going to touch every sector in every geography in every company that needs to adapt. And so I see massive disruption opportunities. But I see also how the VC model is not adapted as a product to that particular transition. One of the reasons being that you were talking about the grand scheme of things, if you want to accelerate market shifts, there's a number of nodes when you look at and deep dive into a sector of value chain, the number of these nodes that cannot be solved by companies. So for example, if you look at agriculture, well, one thing that is preventing the agriculture model to be resilient to climate change and to adapt itself into rigid narrative practices is that it's not what farmers were taught at school. Is what? It's not what farmers were taught at school. You have an education topic, which is there's no shared knowledge today expressed within people that this is the case. We have regulatory issues around heirloom seeds, for example, which could be a great area of research to adapt new diets. And these are not problems or not that can be solved by companies, but by research, education, advocacy, so basically open and strategic resources that we fund in parallel to ventures. So part of the things we're doing is really having this aquasystemic view and saying, if you want to have a true shift of a market, it can not only be driven by one particular company, but you really need to see where it hurts and how you can, with this kind of ecosystem power, try to make things move forward and accelerate that. And I love the fact that Elon Musk at Tesla, he gave away all Tesla patterns in 2013, which accelerated completely the transition towards electric cards. So he gave away for Commons, Common IP, but it was also very beneficial for himself because he became the clear technological leader. That's really neat. Maybe we don't disagree that much, because those other activities I sort of intend to fund basically out of side pocket, I mean, my own. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So far, yeah, we started kind of transition labs where we're going to do a few activities and hopefully be learning from you or even collaborating with you on that. No, but that's exactly it. I used to do these type of things aside, like being part of France Digital, which is one of the main French startup association, trying to do more regulatory work to make it adapted to startup growth and things like that or attracting talents to the startup company, sharing best practices. But I think we need to do it at a more systemic level and to really make sure, because if you look at all these places, well, it's not only based on startups, it's also based on sectors. So this is why I thought we should really integrate it by design and the model basically. That's interesting. It's gonna be really exciting to see how it plays out. Yeah, and when you say you were, how do you feel the investor base or founder based are sensitive to basically all these topics around climate change? Do they see when I talk about a transformation of the economy and so meaning that this is disruption opportunities? I think people are seeing it, right? Right. But I mean, just a few years ago, like some of these companies that are truly transformation and could have like gigantic impact, we could not get them funded for love or money. So, you know, unbelievable companies were not getting funded and now they are. So there's a real fast change, which is wonderful. Is it a culture? What I've seen and experienced is that sometimes people, when you say that you're an impact-driven company or a purpose-driven company, they believe you will not be financially focused or it will entangle performance, is that gone as a perception? Yeah, I just, yes, I think it's completely gone. I think people can see that this gigantic, you know, transition that all of our systems have to go through will drive incredible, like, you know, value creation. You know, we were sort of looking at this and we realized that, you know, over the next 10, 15 years, like another 10 Tesla-sized companies can be built and, you know, then Bill Gates started saying that too. So I think we agree on that. And yes, I mean, venture capital, whether in the traditional way and definitely also in the way you're doing it, you know, can accelerate these transformations and capture value from them, which is... Yeah, and the fact that you're also not funding the kind of same type of classic SaaS companies, but also taking other type of risk, which could be industrial risk or very deep tech risks or that are more capex-intensive, for example, require more capital, is that something you see both founders and investors being more comfortable with and then a pure digital era? Yeah, so I think, you know, what we see is that when we go and talk to these, you know, climate founders, they really appreciate that, you know, people are coming in, building deep conviction, really analyzing their sectors. I mean, there's a lot of sectors, obviously, and trying to pick winners and accelerate them. You know, traditional VCs aren't here. I mean, they're showing up for some deals and that's great and we compete with them, we collaborate with them as usual. But yeah, like, you know, groups with, you know, conviction with expertise that will actually go down and ask the right questions of the founders and not weird questions. I think, you know, we'll both be appreciated in that. Absolutely and I know that in the 2050 team, we had to acquire these diversity of expertise as well and the fact that we do invest in these strategic comments when you talk to people that are experts in their particular sector, it's actually you have a very different relationship to them than when you just come to ask for advice in funding that particular company because you're not asking for advice to make yourself richer, but really to understand how you can help the whole, solving the problem at a global level and helping research progress, helping knowledge to be shared, helping open data models or things like that. So we completely changed the relationship you have and therefore the type of relationship, even for the startups you fund within the different type of actors in the ecosystem. And I've been suffering from the fact that innovation systems have been so much silented, like researchers not talking that much to startups founders or to corporates or that we haven't succeeded in making all these cooperation schemes happen and that we need those today. And so I feel it's coming up a little bit because of this transformation that we know we need to work together. And so that's super inspiring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this is good. Yeah, and as we talk to these founders, I think there's sort of a few things we realize. One is that they actually really appreciate this kind of conviction-driven group. They wanna be connected to each other because these companies and founders have a lot to say to each other. Some only for learning and inspiration for some for actual collaboration. And then there's some stuff that traditional VCs either don't do or actively dislike, like project financing, understanding alternative ways of financing because a lot of these companies will have to build installations and machines and reactors and so on. So that's something I think we can help them with. That means we will also need on a financial perspective angle to drive links with really different type of players, like these guys who are funding infrastructure projects or debt players and try to enlarge our thinking into more diverse funding strategies. The cool thing is there's so much of that money. I mean, everyone, all over, like these big capital funds, they're deciding, you know, it used to be green, right? Right. 10% green, 20% green. And then they have all this money sitting around and it's not necessarily finding good places. We can help with that. One of the things I see as well is that when you've lived through the digital transformation, at the beginning of it, there were no best practices to share between companies. Yeah, yeah. Because you didn't know at that time what it meant to be a job, to be data driven or to be any of these kinds of stuff. So we built the best practice, we built the playbook. And what I see today is that companies, not only you need to solve the problems, but you need to not create more problems, right? So we really are fond of... Smaller problems than the ones you solve. Yeah, if you're solving this, but you're creating new ones here, you mean you're, yeah, not working. So therefore, if you really want to build a sustainable model, you need companies who are aligning their business interests with those of society and both of the planets. And it's super easy to say, but it's super hard to do, you know? And because also we live in a system that is pushing for misalignment, we're favoring basically business interests over the rest. And I love to quote Reed Hastings on this. So Reed Hastings from Netflix. Does that work again? Reed Hastings from Netflix. He says, my biggest competitor is sleep, right? Or he even says my greatest enemy. And the day he said, I read that actually in an interview and I just had finished the book why we sleep from Matthew Walker, where he explains how much just having 15 minutes of sleep less at a population level is so hard on public health. It drives public health issue like more depression, more cardiovascular accidents, more car accidents, more whatever, because health is the number one factor of people. And where is that? And you see, well, so this is misalignment basically when you're pushing your whole company's interests into going against society's interests. So this alignment, I think, we don't know how to do yet. So this complete transformation of the economy. And so we need to share the best practice because we need to establish them. We have no playbook of that. Ah, that's a really good point, yeah. We have no playbook of how you actually are having so good behaviors in terms of regenerating the planet or in terms of, so it's starting. Like, we have topics like diversity and inclusion. We have several topics there, but really trying to find kind of examples of what company did even in terms of competence and how you can make sure that you're not only governed by financial interests, but you also have some stewards who can preserve the mission, for example, or things like that. The good thing is these companies are human systems, right? Absolutely. At least the people we meet are mostly true believers. They really want to do good stuff. I'm not sure, I wonder even how important what the bylaws say is compared to the fact that they're true believers. Yeah, and company culture and incentives. If you only have business, people's incentives based, yeah, well, it comes down to that. How do you drive your company? Obviously it comes from governance. If at the board level you're only looking at financials and you're not talking about anything else, it's a problem. Are you working on example bylaws or practical implementation details like that? Yeah, that's a good question. So we're working on how... We're not, but maybe we should. No, we are, we are. And even for us as a company, we asked ourselves how can we align ourselves, right? As a VC, and when you look at the VC model, you're saying the product works. Yes, it works to create certain type of companies, but we also do believe it's framing the strategy of companies in a certain way. And it does have misalignment by design. To give you an example, so what we've done is to completely align the financial incentives of general partners, so the investors who invest in the companies on the value of the ecosystem it creates, so on the performance of a fund. And therefore we got rid of any financial incentive at the management company level by giving away all their shares to a perpetual purpose trust. So it's like the Nordic Shareholding Foundation model, where basically all our management company is held by trust, and we get no financial incentive at that level. We're only incentivizing the performance of the fund and salary, obviously. Sorry, why is that important? Because if you... So at the Manco level, there's a partnership and the shares of the management company are completely linked to the assets under management, for example, which is not the same strategy optimizing assets under management than optimizing performance of the fund. Okay. And it's not shared throughout all the team, so it also creates misalignment between the team, potentially. And it's the one place where there's only the team who has interest of optimizing that particular value. The rest of the ecosystem doesn't benefit from any of that. Sure. So we got rid of that particular thing. And therefore we have a steward ownership. And so that drives all discussions around board governance and around how you can align yourself completely as a company and by still maintaining the good financial incentives. We need both, right? Yeah, yeah. But by not having things that are pushing you in different directions and that are creating, at a personal level, very strong potentially misalignments. Neat. Yeah. It's actually also inspired by... Because this is basically as having a big board. No, it's just like a governance body and that's voting the budget and making sure that you're taking the right business decisions, but also not changing your mission, for example, or without having stewards looking and saying, yes, this is the right way of doing things. And when you're giving away all these chairs and you're giving this power to people and to your board, you're asking yourself, you know, who are the people that I want to give this power to? Sure. I find this really weird. I don't like big boards, you know. I don't like boards in early stage companies. I do believe in that when your ecosystem governs because this is what we did, we didn't give, we have zero independent board member. It's really people who are part of what we're doing and who have different angles to what we're doing and who are making this decision together. So founders that we finance, but LPs who put money in the fund and the team and all that. So yes, it's the consensus, it's not a consensus, majority of 15 people, which is a big board, but still I really believe we need to think about more decentralized 15.15. Okay, okay. Oh sorry. No, no, no, no, that's not, no. That's my bad hearing. That no. I mean, 15 is already too many. Well, if you want to build more decentralization, which I feel we need and more diversity in decisions. We need a crowdsurf on 15 people, right? You cannot, sorry. You can crowdsurf on 15 people. Yeah. So I think it's important that you have kind of a diversity as well that is explored at that level. So part of the stewards, we have Rashid Sumaila, who's a researcher in Vancouver and he's one of the biggest specialists of fisheries, for example. And so having that partly inside and culture in the company makes you aware when you have this discuss-systemic view of, it makes you feel you're not... I can see how it anchors you to all these indiscriminate, beautiful things. That's really cool. I actually, that I would appreciate. I know you thought about this, also more than me. I know. Cool. I'm doing that. Did you put like kind of a North Star, something like that? It's to help humanity transition to the new world. And this is, I mean, it's going to be better shit. Cleaner, quieter, prettier. It's going to be really good when we get there. And how do you make sure you're not creating other monsters? It's a good question. I don't have a good answer. I think we're thoughtful. I think we want to look at, we want to find people that are true believers. I don't think any of, I mean, none of the founders we meet are not true believers. Or they're quickly, you know, weeded out. I don't even think we take a meeting with them. You can feel it from, you know, through email that people aren't really there. I am such a believer in humans that I think that's enough. I'm a believer in humans as well, but I think we're living in a system that is pushing you naturally to misalign. And this is why I really try to think into how can we design something that naturally is kind of bringing you back by design? Because, yeah. No, I see what you mean. And maybe I'll be a little bit better soon and realize that I was too optimistic. That's a good point. I don't know. I mean, it was funny because at some point I was discussing with the Europe, it's gonna sound out of, it's a different, well, it's in the topic but it's a different angle to it. I was talking to European Commission at some point and they were discussing about the abuse of, that was years ago, even before we had the whistleblower on Facebook and all that. And they were talking about how, what can we do about Facebook, right? And some of them, well, I was like, what type of law did he do? That is not compliant to law. If you really believe that what he did was so wrong, then why did the law, why aren't you not changing the law? Sure. Right? And so that's what I'm saying is that within the borders and within the system, because you are incentivized to optimize profit all the time and the rest is not valued, you're pushed to that direction and that's perfectly legal and fine. So if we don't value the rest at the same level, if we don't put rules that are making us stay, maintain compliance, how do we maintain that? How do we change it? No? I get it. Yeah, it's funny because I'm pretty pessimistic about capitalism in general. Pessimistic or optimistic? It's a monster, right? I just always, yeah, I really, I've maintained the belief that sort of attack and venture could remain on the good side. And I find that easy to believe because of the founders I meet that are so driven and passionate. Yeah, and I agree. But I see what you mean. I agree. I agree. So how bad do you think the transition is gonna be? Is it bad? Yeah. Huh. Like for civilization. So the more, I think for, I've been digging into this a lot, understanding the IPCC scenarios, the cycle of carbon, because you can act upon what you understand, right? And this is one of the reasons I, one of the, well, whatever. So I've been really digging into that. Culture as well. And things do not look good at all. This is part of the reason that I think, you know, changing finance, which is a matrix, is super important because then you have a kind of a network effect. And doing what you do is super important because as you're saying, we don't have that much time. And we will need both to limit and adapt because it's already there. So we absolutely need to adapt already. Then what I really see is that when you're acting upon it and you're meeting as you're saying, when you're saying I meet all these rate founders, you're having so positive energy around all this, right? That it makes it easier and it makes it faster as well because all this energy combines. But the point where I see more sadness is when you kind of don't want to see it. And are in a personal denial about it. Or in France, I'm French. So in France, we say dissonance cognitive. So cognitive dissonance is same in English. And where you're at a personal level completely misaligned. So I think it can be a cause that is guiding a lot of people and that is creating a lot of positive energy and joy and trying to find solutions. And I'm a positive person. So this is why when building 2050, we started by saying our mission is to create a fertile future. You know what? There can be a fertile future. And even the simple thinking about that and trying to identify what it could be and how we can build it is super important because you're driving energy in a common direction and you're entertaining or nurturing that energy. And one of the things I did when I started 2050 because I knew that we needed to fix some words, give some words about that future. And that a better word doesn't mean anything because it will mean something different for you, for me, for anybody in the room. And it's just mean it's great. It's better than yesterday. It doesn't mean it's good. It's not gonna be a fair. It's doesn't mean it's sustainable or anything like that. And one usually when whatever you see around you that is projected towards the future is anxiety, you know? Artificial intelligence in robots are gonna kill our jobs. Climate change is gonna be horrible, blah, blah, blah. And there's nothing around what is the type of society we could wish for and we want to work for and we want to contribute to. And this is why I thought it was very important to put some words on that and to design the vision of what it could be. And because it drives and it designs an investment strategy that is ecosystemic where you can do all this kind of decline of this common strategy. And the interesting thing is that I tried to see if there was some culture where the projection on the future was positive. So I read a lot of science fiction. I read Chinese science fiction, US science fiction, European scanty science fiction and African science fiction. Do you agree that you learned more about the climate crisis from the three-body problem than from most other books? Yes, I did. It's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the only positive, well, if I had to do like a kind of a very simple summary which obviously is not very subtle about all the different things, like US projection of the future of US science fiction is that everything's in the space, technology rocks and it's misery on earth, right? Chinese is more, it's future space, technology is gonna save us, we're gonna find other planets, blah, blah, blah as well. But on the planet, on earth, it's just humans are kind of robots. It's not misery, it's just not very human. And if you look at France, well, France is super interesting because it's kind of back to nature thinking and very anti-attack potentially, but very much into we need to go back to our combination and link to nature. The most interesting thing, Africa. After? African science fiction. Huh. Can you give us a title? Yeah, read Binti from Nadia Oroquafor. What? Binti, that's the name of the book. Binti? And it's actually for teenagers. Wow. It's creative fantasy and it's super interesting because her hero, so she's born in Nigeria, but she lived in the US after, so it's kind of mixed culture still. And she's really anchored in earth, right? They belong and they get energy and they get power and they belong, right? And they get really that very strongly to the planet, but they also have very strong cultural links to their community. They inherited from that, right? And they're part of that. And you can see like what's, they're also part of the society, right? And then it's super positive on technology and with this idea that you got this university in space where all the different cultures come and work all together to get and solve all the earth's problems and you're like, yes, I want that. Wow. I want that one. Let's do it, yes. So we need also, the only thing I'm telling this story is that we need a common narrative that we all want to happen and I think it will be way better if we find out how to build it. You're able to find that one narrative, but maybe a few narratives. Yeah, I agree. Sort of a line or point in the same direction, yeah? And different ones. I mean, it's fine not to have the same, I don't believe in one scenario. Sorry, it can't work, no, no. Yeah. I think we're out of time. I think we're run out of time, yeah. Huh. It's a pleasure. Super pleasure, thank you so much for talking to me. Awesome, thank you. Thanks for listening.