B (3:31)

Thanks, Joel. Yeah. So I grew up between a pine forest outside of Boston in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My mom has been a, a counselor my whole life, doing things from biofeedback and stress management to chronic pain management. And my dad has a PhD in databases from the 1970s and has been a computer scientist my whole life and now works at Harvard as a visiting scholar researching AI. I grew up when I wasn't cooking six courses gourmet meals. In my early teens I was in my happy place in the woods from the White Mountains in New Hampshire to the Adirondacks in western Massachusetts, up to northern Ontario as well and always been deeply aligned with our natural world. When I was a teenager I went spent the summers backpacking in Washington State in nature and climbing Mount Rainier as well as backpacking up in Alaska and just being surrounded by the pristine beauty that is our natural world. I even spent some time in undergrad in the summertime where I led 12 year olds on backpacking trips up in Alaska and helped them connect with nature and connect with themselves. Really Sure, I. So I've always been deeply aligned with, with our world, but really fell in love with biology and diving into how the world works in high school.

A (5:04)

Love.

B (5:05)

Just asking questions that people didn't have the answers to. And when I started my undergrad, just when I was in the lab from freshman year on researching cyanobacteria and how light, how they adapt to light and use light as an energy source and it was just really cool, you know, understanding something that no one else has looked into before and, and I really caught the bug of science and biology and thought I wanted to go down the academic career path. And so I went from my undergrad at Bucknell University to Johns Hopkins for my PhD where I was studying the molecular and cell biology of eye development. And you know, I was building genetically modified mice using CRISPR that came out a few years before that, using other innovative technologies and building up my muscle and critical thinking and diving deep into novel fields, as well as building a collaborative team of scientists around the globe to really uplevel my project and bring it so that we could publish in Science Advances. And I saw the power of innovation then when a new technique would come out, we would be able to reproduce it in the lab and utilize it to answer questions we didn't have access to before. Whether it was single cell sequencing that came out while I was in my PhD research doing my thesis research. And then we were able to take the learnings from that and apply it to my project and sequence 80,000 single cells during mouse eye development or engineering microbes and leveraging the power of biology. There's. It was a lot of fun and you know, got to understand something that no one ever did before. And it was a beautiful time. But it was, it was tough. It's a tough career path going down the PhD, doing something that takes six, seven years and really delaying that gratification and pushing things out in that way. I was lucky that on the first day I started my PhD, I met my now wife who was going through the program as well at the same time as me. And she's just been my advisor, my inspiration, my mentor throughout the whole process and kept me grounded. And so I thought I wanted to go down the academic career route. And once I was in academia, I didn't. I realized it wasn't for me. So I decided to go down, kind of try the biotech out for a little bit. And so I went to work at Genentech trying to develop a novel drug for diabetic macular edema when the eye degenerates in late stage diabetes. And I was excited to work at Genentech because they were one of the first companies that pioneered synthetic biology. They were able to make insulin recombinantly through using microbes instead of previously. It was just isolated from cow pancreas. It would take 23,000 animals a year to make it. And then they were able to express the insulin gene in yeast and then grow it up and sell it and make a lot of money, but also show that microbes are extremely powerful and can be almost mini machines. But so while I was at Genentech, I, you know, I thought I wanted to have an impact in humanity and healthcare. I thought I wanted to make people's lives better. But I had a crisis. You know, I felt it in my body that it wasn't the right thing for me. And my wife really helped me dive deep and understand what was going on.

A (8:49)

Yeah.

B (8:50)

And really trying to tap into my soul's purpose and think about kind of what led me up to that point and what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And she helped me figure out that my soul's purpose is to have a global scale impact on our climate crisis. At that time, five, six years ago, we were heading towards 4 degrees Celsius of warming and the catastrophic effect that could and would have on humanity, on our ecosystems. I want to do something to try to bend that curve and I didn't really want to make people healthier on a sick planet. I saw the climate crisis as kind of this overarching issue that I really wanted to focus on. And it brought me back to my roots really being in nature my whole life.

A (9:38)

Sure.

B (9:41)

I also in my free time when I was at Genentech and after I left, I just kept getting pulled into this innovation ecosystem that you have been a part of for a long time and seeing just the power, the drive of these amazing entrepreneurs and the solutions and the technology that they had was just endlessly inspiring and wanted to find a way to support them with capital, mentorship and beyond. And so I started my journey as an angel investor and like you said, I built a portfolio of 86 companies across many verticals in climate tech. As I was learning with my own capital at risk and supporting early stage companies that still had a lot of technological risk and using some of the deep research and other skills I built in my PhD to try to retire some of that or at least understand it. And I think I've been doing a pretty decent job of that over the last four and a half years. Having markups of 12x in direct lithium extraction, two companies at 5x1 and wind energy technology and many in the 2-4x range. And I was really loving the investing. But then I had the opportunity to put on the operator hat and become a co founder of a battery materials company, green spear. Turning CO2 into battery grade graphite, which was a lot of fun, really helped me build some empathy too for the founder journey and the hustle that's involved there. Unfortunately, me and the cto, the co founder, had a falling out after a handful of months, but I was still able to reorient the business model to make a venture backable and bring in a bunch of my network to really help out grow the company. And then for the last two and a half years I've been professionalizing my investing journey through working in the climate venture capital space across a few firms as well as helping to operationalize and help run the Climate Impact angel group. And this whole time as well, for the last three years or so I've been building community around climate tech in the mid Atlantic here where I live in Baltimore, hosting monthly gatherings to just help build the community. And we started from a dozen people and now we're above 600, which has been so cool and heartwarming to really just bring aligned people together for peer support and mentorship. But also companies have found co founders in the group, there's been investments that have been made through the group and so it's just so cool to be a part of that. And also I, because of the community building role that I've been doing, it kind of launched me into supporting D.C. climate Week. And we had the first one this last April, kicked off with 4,700 people in 152 events. And it was this beautiful movement and we're gearing up for year two next year with, you know, ideally 10,000 plus people. So would certainly love to have you join. And then what I've been spending my time on now is Lyken Ventures, my climate hard tech venture capital fund. And really excited on how this journey has helped me grow my career into venture capital and just supporting the most amazing people I've ever met and just feel so honored to have this role.

A (13:05)

That's amazing. So I think there's a couple things to unpack. So when you're thinking about doing a PhD, and if other people are too, what should they be mindful of, you know, in terms of the, the benefits to, to having it and then also kind of the, the unexpected challenges of going through that process.

B (13:28)

Yeah, you know, I think it's been, it was a really amazing continuation of my education. You go from undergrad where you're in the teaching labs doing these beautifully curated experiments that, you know, have a very high success rate, and then you're thrown into this training and program of the PhD where you're doing something that no one ever done before. You certainly are surrounded by a group of amazing mentors and peers that get you through that, but you're going into the unknown to solve something new. I think the most important and hardest part is choosing your mentor that you're going to be working with.

A (14:09)

Sure.

B (14:09)

I at Hopkins were able to rotate amongst four different mentors and and, you know, PIs or heads of a lab and really make sure the vibes check out and make sure you're really aligned with their mission and their research goals. But one of the biggest things that I took from my PhD was just the ability to communicate across a wide variety of audiences. We had many opportunities to speak to other scientists, to go on stage at conferences, to present our work, and I tap into that almost every day now in this new role. But also, you know, just the critical thinking and the ability to really dive into the primary literature and understand things from a fundamental aspect, I think has been critical as well. And all the diligence that I'm doing these days on the, on the investment side, unexpected challenges is it always takes longer than you think it will. It's never the easy journey. Certainly getting something new out into the world that's impactful, similar to a company, but it doesn't have necessarily the defined steps of company building. Although I know I have friends that pivoted in the middle of their PhD programs and came out with something really beautiful at the end of it. So it certainly pushes you beyond any extremes you've had before. And it's really had points in time where it wrecked me emotionally in different ways, but I feel better because of it. How about you? What was your journey on your PhD?

A (15:43)

So couple learnings for me is essentially, you know, who is on your committee makes a big deal because you want to have people that are cheering you on and supporting you, especially when you're hitting a speed bump. I would say what really helps too is if you can, you know, some of your academic curriculum, if you can use some of those learnings into kind of piecing together your PhD, that also helps too. You're not necessarily double dipping, but, you know, you're kind of already doing things in, in the direction of where you want to go. I think that was a big thing for me. And then I think just kind of being persistent, you know, I, I had a, you know, handful of challenges I didn't think I was going to get through. And then, you know, just kind of kept, kept going. And that really helped too. And I think that that has so many parallels with being a founder, you know, and, you know, when you're doing a PhD, when you're completing your, your proposal exam and you're doing your dissertation, the thing is, you know, you, you have to really do something that is not out there in the market. So I think, I think people that can do a PhD or people that are also in product management Right. You have to really make sure that you're doing something different. If you're a product manager, that was kind of what my trade was a lot of times too. Like, if we're actually going to be performing a new initiative, we have to do a lot of research in terms of has this been done already? Is this a big market? Are we going to make any money doing this? And it's the same parallels with investing in a company, right? The company needs to be doing something better, faster, cheaper. They are doing something that is step functions better than the market. And then, you know, the only, the only thing I throw in is from a business standpoint, you have to, you have to make sure it makes money. Right? That's the only thing with a PhD necessarily. You're not as enterprising with, with a PhD, I think also with data collection, if you can get people to help you, that will also speed up the time too, because you have to, you know, oftentimes you have to do things within significant difference. Right. Or, you know, you know, some type of statistical proof that you've statistically done something differently than others. So, you know, my doctor was in definitely a heavily technical field. It was in modeling and simulation. So we had to kind of obviously show the tech barrier that we're breaking. But I think that was the main thing. I think another big thing is timing. I would say with everything in life, timing is now, right? If you want to make a change, if you want to do what you want to do, do it now. The only thing with a PhD is if you're going to do that, it's much easier if you're not married and you have three kids already. Right. Because it's just the time is not there. But if you really, really want to do it and you're 50 years old, I mean, you don't have much time left. And if that's something that you really want to do, and it's what you've always wanted to do, the time is now, right? So I think timing is everything, but then I think half of it is actually just doing it and taking action too.

B (18:43)

Right.

A (18:44)

So.

B (18:46)

Yeah.

A (18:46)

I don't know if you have any reactions to those comments.

B (18:50)

Yeah, you know, I would say that while you don't have to make money with the output of the PhD, you still have to compete for money from stakeholders. You gotta, you know, submit the money to grantees and really convince them that this is the most impactful use of their dollars. And I totally agree that it's very much aligned with Project Management, whether you're a solo researcher or having a team like me where cross continents need to organize the data discovery and really the learnings from everything.

A (19:20)

Yeah, I would say too, it's to your point. I've got a old college buddy of mine that is now in academia. He's kind of made a career as a professor and he's crushing it. I mean he's raised millions and millions and probably billions now for, for research grants. And that's essentially fundraising. Right. You have to probably make a pitch and, and convince people. So it's sales and fundraising. So it's the same thing that the founder would have to do. So I think there's a lot of different, you know, parallels there. But switching gears. Let's talk about completely switching gears. Let's talk about community. You know, we've built a community at Sutton Capital in person and virtual, you know, around the business of capital. But you know, what advice would you give because you've built this great community on climate and you know, for those people that are in the, the D.C. area, you know, reach out to Justin to, to be part of that. But you know, what would you recommend for people just starting out to build a community? What, what advice would you give?

B (20:26)

Yeah, when I. For investors? Absolutely. You know, when Nate and I started the Baltimore Climatech meetups group, I found that I was driving an hour each way into D.C. to meet the same types of people to go to the climate DC meetup. And we didn't have that around here and so we thought let's try. We threw it out on LinkedIn and got a dozen people to come. And now it's been this beautiful kind of really snowballing into such an amazing, heart connected community. But the first suggestion is just do it, just try it and understand who you want to bring together and try to get them in the same room. And then once you have these amazing people together, beautiful things keep happening. As one of my mentors says, everyone needs more friends in climate and we try to help have a room when that's possible. I also as well have launched a few other communities, the climate funders community. I saw that the there's been a disparate, loosely organized, organized group of venture capitalists, angel investors, LPs in the climate space in the mid Atlantic here mainly because, you know, maybe one group invests in battery materials, another group invests in software, another group invests in cyber, but there's all this climate bent to a lot of their portfolio companies and so yeah, providing the container to bring them all together and meet and help to level up the ecosystem locally has been really nice to be a part of as well. I think just see what communities you want to be a part of and see what communities there are and try to find a way that you can throw something out into the world. It's so easy now on Luma to just host an event and get something going. And it certainly took a lot of work and over 200 volunteers to get DC Climate Week off the ground for our first year. But we provide a container that the community leaned into and it was a majority was just community driven events. Whether it was a startup throwing a happy hour or a non profit really building a channel.

A (22:36)

Yeah, I think, look, half of being a fund manager and a founder this day and age is being a content creator, a community, community builder, a media platform. So there's, there's so many different hats and you know, no matter how great of an investor, investor you are, if nobody really knows about you, then it doesn't really matter, right? So I think it's the same thing if you think about the top managers, right, if you think about like Ray Dalio, if you think about, you know, David Rubenstein, right, they all have kind of built a brand around them and people that are investing, you know, somebody was asking me about this the other day, it's like, oh, you know, like is AI going to completely decimate the VC ecosystem? I mean the truth of the matter is if you're in a boardroom and you're possibly talking to an LP and the LP asks you about the climate space, you can't like turn your laptop around and show them your chat GPT search, right? So they, they, there's a, there's a competency that's required especially when it's verbal communication and you know, if somebody's going to wire you a ten million dollar check, you know, they need, they need to know who this person is. And very similar to picking a partner in life, you know, you have to feel the vibe, right, because there's so much great quality, you know, so many great investment products out there. You gotta, you know, the only differentiator is that they, they like you as a person and they want to go on that journey with you. But you can't really automate that with AI for now, you know, I mean, unless, you know, but there are tools and there are systems and you know, platforms that are going to automate a lot of the analytics and do predictive modeling. But I think that's, in my opinion, I think that the investment space, also the, the healthcare space, like you're, if you got to do a heart, if you need heart surgery, you're not gonna, you're not gonna have a chat GPT powered robot to do it today. Right? You're gonna, you're gonna want to talk to a human being because this is your life at stake or is, I think, you know, with those kind of critical regulated industries and just kind of critical workflows, I think you, you know, people still want to talk to a human being.

B (24:45)

Absolutely. And I think some of the things that have been most powerful to me in building these communities and these friendships is just showing up and being genuine without expectations. And you know, I started this out of a spirit of generosity and building new friendships and it's really paid back many, many, many times over. But just showing up and being there to hold space for other amazing people.

A (25:11)

Absolutely. Well, walk me through kind of your thought process with building this investment firm. I guess what was going on in your mind and you know, what advice would you give to people that maybe in the second chapter of their career they want to go out and start their own investment fund?

B (25:30)

Yeah, I, you know, so I've been very motivated certainly by the climate crisis and then leading up to building of like adventures. One of the biggest changes in my life was my wife got pregnant and we were about to have our first daughter, our first child, our daughter Lyra. And so that really had a big switch in my mind where it was wonderful to catalyze, you know, capital in towards climate and towards these impactful companies, but wanted to do it on a larger, broader scale that I could really support the companies I thought were going to be the most impactful on the global stage. But about building the investment firm, you know, I, I started with learning with my own dollars at risk through angel investing and started to build up my thesis during that time and get excited at the intersection of biology and climate. Take takes things from my PhD and my previous world and see how they could be applied towards our climate crisis. Like biomanufacturing, turning microbes into the industry of the future, like what Genentech did many, many decades ago, although now that's accessible on a much larger scale in a way that can economically compete with legacy industries. And then through the time as a co founder of the battery graphite company, fell in love with critical minerals and saw the massive opportunity that there was in that space. And then, you know, through building relationships with founders in my time in venture capital and you know, learning from many mentors, throughout that time really helped to narrow down on some of these sectors that I think are the most prime for disruption going forward with the largest opportunities. One of them I will say when I was at Resilient Earth Capital, this climate angel group in a loosely based here locally, they had a thesis around both climate crisis mitigation as well as adaptation and resilience. And up until then I, I wasn't entirely sure about my interest in supporting, you know, the adaptation and resilience sector. But through my, you know, friendships and mentors there, I really learned that. I mean even now we're heading towards a 3 degree Celsius world and we need to prepare. We're seeing the prevalence of billion dollar disasters double every decade. Someone's dying from extreme heat every minute on this planet right now. And we need to find ways to prepare our agricultural systems. Photosynthesis shuts off at 40 degrees Celsius and there's so many different outcomes that are coming from our climate crisis that we're now over one and a half degrees that we have to be ready for. And it's also a huge market opportunity, $1.4 trillion market annually around the globe and rapidly growing. And so I started to piece these various sectors together that I was angel investing in and saw some really amazing opportunities there. And what was going on in my mind is just really how can I have the largest impact and how can we support these companies that are changing the world? And to be honest, I saw endless deal flow of my time in these spaces in the electrification and transportation sectors and there was just innovation after innovation. But it was hard to get my excitement up around them because these sectors have gotten 65% of investment in the past few decades, attracting the majority of climate funding. But they're just over a quarter of emissions on the global scale. And there's all these other sectors now where the technology is ready to win. And those were one the ones that continually keep attracting me. Like the industrial heat problem, you know, is 10% of global CO2 emissions and almost a quarter of our global energy use and finding a way to electrify that and get off of fossil fuels there. And now we're seeing some amazing companies in that space begin to grow.

A (29:31)

That's amazing. As far as the climate landscape, can you unpack that for us in terms of maybe some of the key verticals and, and then you know, whatever you're allowed to share, you know, just some exciting companies that are innovating in those spaces. But I think when we think, when we think of climate Everyone has a different definition. I, I have my own, I've also invested in climate. But you know, we'd love to just have you unpack it for us because you're the expert, you know.

B (30:04)

Glad to see you're deploying into climate tech companies. Certainly climate is extremely broad. You know, it touches almost every aspect of our economy. Whether you're a software solution that's accounting for carbon emissions and other pollutants or optimizing energy flow across our energy grid or if you're generating clean electricity like solar and wind energy, certainly a bright spot. We had more renewable energy deployed last year than the global increase in energy demand. So we're starting to deploy these, the cheapest source of energy on the planet now. And in Pakistan they're using solar panels for fences. It's getting cheap, cheaper than plywood over there. But there's verticals like the industrial processes making steel, cement, aluminum. There's companies that are taking petroleum out of the plastic supply chain, which is one of the cheapest things on the planet, plastic. And so finding ways to attack that and remediate that in an economically viable way has certainly been challenging until more and more recently. There are, you know, critical minerals. If you're rare earth elements, you know, they're trendy in the news now. If you go to a rare earth element refinery in China, it's acres and acres of a toxic wasteland. There's massive pollution from those, those factories and those processing supply chains. However, when you come over here in the US you're seeing climate tech or a clean version of that. You know, Phoenix Tailings just opened a rare earth element refining facility up in New Hampshire and it's, you know, there's almost no output, there's almost no, there's no emissions from it. It's, it's beautiful. And so it really touches on so many different parts of our economy from the minerals in our cell phone through to the cars we drive. And you know, it's certainly something I can't stop learning and diving into. Like I mentioned, the biomanufacturing previously is something that I'm certainly very bullish on in my angel investing days. 60% of all physical inputs to our economy can be made through engineered biology. The cost of sequencing has come down 100,000 times in the last few decades as well as synthesis lever throw, AI on top of that and you can design novel materials, design the scale up process and you can build almost anything you want. In the material world. It's predicted that 30% of global manufacturing is going to interact with biomanufacturing or biomanufactured products in the next decade. So certainly really exciting leaning into that space. There's many companies and founders that I'm interacting with there frequently. One example that I'm really excited about, they take any type of agricultural waste from sawdust and rice straw to the leftovers from Roman corn, the corn stover, and they can transform it into sustainable aviation fuel. That's the same price as jet fuel. Using the power of biology, like I mentioned previously, the industrial process heat to make steel, cement, aluminum, food, et cetera. We're using heat in almost every manufacturing process across our economy and that's a huge lever of emissions. One company that I angel invested in, Collectra, they're developing a thermal battery and they're able to charge it for just an hour or a small amount of time during the day when energy is the cheapest and the cleanest, and then deploy that heat as needed 24, 7. And they can do it. You know, natural gas is certainly one of the cheapest ways to do it and they can do it 65% cheaper than natural gas through the arbitrage, the high round trip efficiency and the low cost of materials. And there's other examples of companies doing that, like Rondo, that just deployed 100 megawatt system as well as Antora Energy. And so it's really a way to solve this high temperature process heat that is finally coming out into the world and doing it. We're seeing climate tech being deployed across our economy on a daily basis. Whether no matter what the news says, you know, a friend of mine, building via separations, they're able to pull water out of manufacturing processes and they can do it for, you know, 30% cheaper or so than the natural gas. And that's a three year or less payback period. Reducing opex, increasing uptime, saving everyone money. They don't even talk about the climate impact of their technology and their electrification and their pitch. They're just talking economics. And there's many examples of companies doing that. Now we're in this climate tech 3.0 realm, maybe return to fundamentals. And there are companies that the unit economics are pensing out early enough that they can start booking some revenue and be competitive from the early stages.

A (35:24)

Sure, that's really helpful. So would love to know your process in terms of how to source screen deals, you know, if you were to bring on a, you know, an associate. Right. How would you train them? And you know, just kind of walk us through the art of funneling maybe a first pitch from a founder. How do you maybe eliminate them? What are kind of key telling tells that maybe they're just not a good fit for, you know, venture capital. Right. There could be some great businesses that are just great as small businesses. But when you're thinking about venture scale, you know, what people don't always understand is, you know, you need to make sure when you look at every deal, it possibly could return the fund. Right. I mean, especially depending on, you know, the size of your fund and when you're doing portfolio construction that might be interesting to share, obviously without sharing anything proprietary or, you know, without, without soliciting, obviously. But, but you know, just kind of in terms of looking at the deal, how do you think about it? You know, is it, is it a Monday partners meeting and then how does it make it to investment committee? And then, you know, what are some other. Especially for the climate and hard tech space, you know, I've been in that space and a lot of times, you know, well, I mean I, I'm not a mechanical engineer in, by no means, but there, there's been times where I, I've had colleagues when I was investing in hard tech, I've had colleagues actually spend time with the founding team and ask for the mechanical samples and actually take the samples apart and look at the circuits. You know, the, this, this person had like a mechanical engineering background. So in terms of diligence, sometimes you, you want to go that far. And I think my tech background kind of helped me in terms of like the different diligence and kind of thinking about the validity of the technology. But you know, we'll love a little more insight because you're much closer to this in terms of how do you, how do you go through those sniff tests to make sure it's worth your time to go beyond the first pitch, beyond the Monday partners meeting, beyond first round, second round, third round of diligence and hey, we're in the investment committee. What are we looking for in the investment committee?

B (37:41)

Yeah, thank you for that. You know, as I've been a consummate community builder, as I, as I keep coming back to as well as, you know, the experience of leveraging the power of amazing cross functional people. During my PhD and beyond, kind of, I did that as well during the angel investing days. I try to do that as I build this loose expert network that I am able to tap into across the many verticals, the domains that I'm really excited about. I've, you know, my network includes people from think tanks like Rocky Mountain Institute from academics. I work a lot with Johns Hopkins and helping them to accelerate their climate technology commercialization. They have Hopkins receives more grant funding than any school in the country and yet their track record on spinning up biotech is amazing. But climate tech, not as much. And so trying to certainly help them in that regard how I can and that's given me access to a lot of the community there, but also academics around the country as well as other founders, other investors. And that's been helpful for both sourcing deals. Having founders that have invested in, that have received some of the value adds just really the support that I've been able to give them since I joined their cap table or even before having them refer their friends to me as founders that they really align with and think are doing amazing things. That's been heartwarming and just beautiful to receive, but also building community and network across the many dozen and a half plus climate hard tech accelerators around the country like activate, like the SOSVs, like generator and beyond. So that's been very helpful, certainly building up a deal flow pipeline. And the companies that I've really gravitated towards in my angel investing have been around the seed stage, typically second round of capital coming in. And I find that that helped me in my investing to de risk the investment there and cut out some of the companies that might not be in the venture scale in the venture time frame, which can certainly be quite a crazy direction for a lot of founders to go down. But the ones that are able to can really scale their impact and at the speed and breadth that's needed for this climate crisis. The key tells to eliminate founders. You know, I really try to socialize the, the angel deals that I've been a part of throughout my expert network and understand the various perspectives on the technology, the markets, the founders doing reference checks and beyond. And yeah, it's tough in hard tech. You know, these companies have a lot of IP deep inside of them and bringing in the IP lawyers that are friends of mine, the, the, the founders in the critical minerals space that you know, certainly have their, their hands, hands to the ground there and things of that nature. And the companies that have been doing the best in my angel portfolio have been those that the unit economics really pencil out on the earlier stage. So let's say you're doing biomanufacturing and you're able to tap into the billion dollars that the Department of Defense has earmarked and spent as they start building out national infrastructure. The tanks that they have are you know, 20,000, 25,000 liters and you're able to make these small batches of product of these high value chemicals and sell them and make money on them, have a margin instead of waiting till you're scaling to the million gallon fermenters and beyond. And so the companies that are able to attack the market from even the one they're in the earlier phases of growth have been able to really catalytically grow. And those are some of the things that I've been looking for.

A (41:33)

What would you look for if you were to hire an associate or a principal? I guess what are the skills that you think are important to become a good investor, especially in the climate space?

B (41:47)

Yeah, you know, I have certainly have many friends that I been trying to bring on and support, but it's hard with such a small fund to really have the capital to pay out these people. But there's certainly many areas that I would love some help in that I have from my venture partners already in the fund as well as we have a few fellows that are helping out in the fund at the moment. But I love the deep technical expertise that I bring into it. And one of my fellows right now, Amy has been doing an amazing job. She's a PhD student in Michigan and also helps to run their climate venture, their student run climate venture fund. And so she's been leaning in and it's been very, very supportive. I love, you know, I would love found to bring people into the team that have a technical background, maybe that has some diversity from the one that I have in the biology space and to really build up the core competency, but that also have some proven track record in the financial world. I bring my venture experience, my angel investing experience, my public equity investing experience and beyond and certainly been very interested in the more economist for a lot of my life. But, but yeah, and so I think, you know, there's a lot of venture funds that some of the larger ones are able to have these PhD teams to understand the deep technical risk at the early stage. And a lot of the smaller funds might not have those teams that are able to identify the companies there and really catalytically de risk and so trying to bring people in that bring that diversity and that knowledge in and I think that's some of the, the things that I bring to the table with like inventures.

A (43:39)

Sure. Where do you think AI is going to innovate the most, especially in the climate space?

B (43:47)

Yeah, AI. I think there's certainly roles for AI in optimizing the energy grid and controlling distributed energy resources and understanding kind of the flow of energy transmission as well. But I think its biggest potential is in novel material optimization and training models based on research results that help you to develop novel materials that are cheaper, better, faster, more deployable, have longer longevity using AI and biomanufacturing, like I said previously, to really level up the speed to market, to level up the scale up process and the design. So I think we see these crazy valuations in AI companies, but when you apply AI to a lot of these materials companies, critical minerals companies, et cetera, you're able to have the normal valuations, but the power of AI to really help these companies grow and bring in some of the deep understanding and research domains in a proven way and analyze millions of data points to give you the new material that you want to use and then pull it apart, find new data points, optimize that and really make that process faster, more iterative.

A (45:10)

Yeah, no, that's helpful. Well, as we wrap up number one, I want to thank you for giving us all of your time and wisdom. I always like to wrap up every podcast with just one piece of advice. It could be from a mentor, could be from a professor, could be from a colleague or a family member. So what's one piece of advice you like to leave us?

B (45:34)

Yeah, I'd say from one of my good friends and mentors, JP Mascarella. Everybody needs more friends in climate and that certainly he's been in climate for 35 years plus and that's been helped him on his journey across his, his career. But I think that applies in whatever field you're in. And yeah, the power of meeting amazing people and putting yourself out there and bringing new people into your, into your world. And I also think doing the deep inner work to understand yourself has really motivated and driven me as and so just showing up in your whole self and every interaction.

A (46:17)

Yeah, I heard something this morning. It was from a book I was listening to. But you don't always need the map to get going. So a lot of times you can just kind of start and the map will kind of slowly kind of develop as it comes. I think if you front load everything, expect what you've planned to not happen and expect some pitfalls along the way. But if you're kind of building a business, you launch a pilot, you just launch, right? And get some feedback, your customers to tell you what to do. Same thing if you're ever thinking about launching a fund, you know, kind of talk to some mentors about it and just see if it even makes sense to. To launch a fund and if that thesis makes sense and get some feedback, obviously, you know, you. You need to kind of take everybody's inputs and synthesize it. Just because one person says something, that doesn't mean that's the direction you should go. I feel like you should take all those inputs from everybody and then kind of, to your point, do that deep work and say, hey, you know what? These three people said this, these four people said this. But this is what I feel. And, you know, I think collectively with all that data, I think this is my final kind of way forward. I think that that helps, too, so.

B (47:28)

Absolutely. And I'll just sign off by inviting everyone to come join me at DC Climate Week, April 20, 26th, 2026. And it's going to be an amazing time.

A (47:41)

Great. Yeah. Well, send me the link and we'll share it out with the community and. Sounds like an exciting community that you're building, and thanks for all that you do.

B (47:49)

Thank you, Joel.

A (47:50)

All right, take care.

B (47:52)

Bye.