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Last spring, Midas List alum – and 2015 Forbes cover venture cowboy – Chris Sacca put his spurs back on after dramatically announcing in 2017 he was hanging them up. The Twitter and Uber investor and billionaire’s new focus: Lowercarbon Capital, a firm he’s running with partner Clay Dumas and wife Crystal, focused on clean tech and environment-focused startups.
Once a ‘Shark Tank’ staple, Sacca’s tougher to wrangle now. But Midas Touch caught up with him on Thursday for an interview. Highlights below – and more to come on Monday on Forbes.com.
Midas Touch: Cleantech investing got a really bad rap in the 2000s. Do you think the scar tissue the VC community developed after some flameouts was deserved? What’s changed?
Chris Sacca: “I am super grateful to the gals and guys who put real money and sweat to work in the first wave of climate investing. I admire the risks they took. And you know what? If you look at the numbers today, their early portfolios have actually performed well. It just took more than ten years.
The issue was that it was just too damn expensive to start stuff back when they were investing. CapEx and OpEx were bonk. And so much of the stuff they wanted to build required handouts from lawmakers because the pricing just didn’t make sense. The firms that were pushing cleantech were staffing up with lobbyists to try to schmooze folks in Congress to get the subsidies they needed to have a snowball’s chance on a superhot planet.
But so much is different now. Huge, shared computing clusters have allowed nuclear fusion to be an impending reality. Bio and agricultural advancements are coming out of shared lab space that startups could’ve never afforded. Manufacturing is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper. Electrochemistry and stuff like CRISPR have all come so far that today’s founders can piggyback off of the hard work of those who took stabs at this shit before. Add to this that we now have a generation of hardcore scientists who went to school knowing that they wanted to start a climate tech company. Those folks used to dig into this super geeky biophysics hoping one day they would be a tenured professor with some steady health insurance.
Now we have this wave of punishingly brilliant minds who have benefitted from the demystification of the startup journey, thanks to programs like Y Combinator, who grab their degrees and raise a seed round to make their thesis a reality. We also have a couple of stealth companies where the founders are big name traditional tech entrepreneurs who have had legit exits and are now turning their talents toward saving the planet. I’m just blown away by the brains and the chops of the teams taking on the biggest challenge facing all living things on planet Earth. Can you tell I get excited about this shit?”
MT: How many investments have you made so far? Are these startups clustered in any geographies more than others?
CS: “As of today, we have invested in 40 companies. As of tomorrow, assuming we wrap this interview up in time to power through all of the DocuSigns, that number will be 41. Geographically, this stuff is everywhere. Europe seems to have had a head start. Turns out graduating without a small country’s GDP worth of student loans on your back makes it easier to focus on building some cool shit. And huge European companies have tended to make it a bigger priority to buy cleaner products and services, so the markets there have evolved much faster. But we have teams in Fort Worth, Boulder, Gothenburg, London, Maine, Australia, Fresno, Singapore, Berlin, Squamish, Houston, Detroit, and probably a bunch of other places I can’t roll off the top of my head. Get your hands on some Zillow stock because it has never been clearer that being in the traditional startup cities just doesn’t matter like it used to.”
MT: What’s the top piece of advice you both would give aspiring entrepreneurs interested in climate/clean tech? Do they need to be scientists? Practitioners? What about for the rest of us, whether it’s supporting them, buying from them, or investing in them?
CS: “Climate isn’t just some niche. This shit touches every single aspect of our lives. What we eat and drink, where and how we live, how we get around, the shit we use, how our lives are powered, name it. It’s everything. Yes, scientists and engineers are an indispensable part of the equation and fingers crossed this administration makes it easier for the best and the brightest to keep bringing their talents to the U.S. and that they start their companies here. But, just like not everyone who works at a tech company is a coder, not everyone who works at a climate tech company has a lab coat on. These companies need sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, HR, comms, as well as mechanics, drillers, farmhands, fishermen and women, and so on. In fact, people with those skills will be even more helpful because these companies are starting small and often don’t have experience in those areas.
So, yeah, want to be helpful? Check out the jobs pages at these companies. It may be unlike work you are doing now but you’ll feel so much prouder to roll up your sleeves every day. If you’re an investor, as long as you don’t have some kind of allergy to making money, get out your checkbook. If you are a consumer, hell yeah you should buy clean shit. Do so because these products are just plain better, cheaper, faster, cooler, and yeah, maybe get involved in this space if you, I don’t know, care about saving a few billion lives, give or take.”
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