🏭 Carbon tech — 402 companies, $3.1B raised, 211 deals
Your 3-minute summary of climate tech, startups, better habits, and deep work.
Good morning, folks.
In today’s 3-minute read, we’ll cover these juicy nuggets:
📒 Carbon tech — 159 investors with $202B in assets under management.
🔥 SEC is fired up about GHG disclosure.
🏢 A podcast to make you think bigger.
💪 66 out of 70 projects failed. But…
⛰️ Want a climate CEO peer group?
🥴 P.S. Stop forcing it.
Enjoy.
Chris
📒 Carbon tech — 159 investors with $202B in assets under management.
This is one of my favorite reports.
Here are some other teasers of the startups and active corporates that they track.
Carbon tech startups:
Corporates interested in carbon tech:
Sample active investors in carbon tech:
But it’s still early days (revenue stage):
🔥 SEC is fired up about GHG disclosure.
In case you live under a rock, this latest SEC news is big.
Like UNC and Duke playing in the Final 4 for Coach K’s last year.*
OK, not that big. But you get the idea.
Here’s a summary line from the law firm Kirkland & Ellis:
On March 21, 2022, the SEC proposed rule amendments that would require public companies to include certain climate-related information in their registration statements and periodic reports, including oversight and governance, material impacts (operational and financial), risk identification and management, and Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions (the “Proposed Rule”)
These additional excerpts are helpful:
If adopted, the breadth, specificity and complexity of the Proposed Rule would arguably result in one of the most sweeping changes to public companies’ disclosure obligations in recent memory.
The SEC has framed the Proposed Rule as a justified response to “investor need [for] information about climate-related risks” that “have present financial consequences.”
And don’t think this would only affect sustainability professionals.
The Proposed Rule includes mandatory disclosures regarding:
the oversight and governance of climate-related risks by the company’s board and management;
how climate-related risks identified by the company have had or are likely to have a material impact on its business and consolidated financial statements,5 as well as how climate risks affect its strategy, business model and outlook;
the company’s processes for identifying, assessing and managing climate-related risks and whether any such processes are integrated into the company’s overall risk management system or processes;
Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions,6 separately disclosed, expressed in absolute terms (not including offsets) both:
by disaggregated constituent greenhouse gases and in the aggregate, and
in terms of intensity;
Scope 3 GHG emissions7 and intensity, if material, or if the company has set a GHG emissions reduction target or goal that includes its Scope 3 emissions; and
to the extent applicable, details on the company’s public climate-related targets or goals (including any use of carbon offsets or renewable energy certificates [“RECs”] to achieve such targets and goals), transition plan, use of scenario analysis and/or use of internal carbon pricing.
Get Kirkland’s primer on the SEC rule here.
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* If you’re new to this newsletter, it might help to know that my Ph.D. is from UNC, and I teach there. But I also teach at Duke. Go blue!
🏢 A podcast to make you think bigger.
Last Thursday, I published my podcast with Sandeep Ahuja, CEO of cove.tool.
For a sense of their climate impact, in 2021 their software helped architecture, engineering, and construction professionals design more energy-efficient buildings in order to catalyze 5x more carbon reductions than Tesla. 🤯
Co-led by Cofounder and CEO Sandeep Ahuja, cove.tool is an end-to-end automated green building performance software suite. It produces beautiful analysis graphics for energy, daylight, carbon, HVAC design, and much more.
Using machine learning, it considers thousands of options in order to select the lowest cost and highest performance material components for new construction and renovations.
cove.tool has raised over $36M of venture capital funding, including investors such as FootPrint Coalition (Robert Downey, Jr.'s fund), Third Sphere, URBAN-X, and Mucker Capital.
Sandeep is also the founder of a successful sustainability consulting firm Pattern r+d.
As a Forbes 30 under 30, she has also presented at the UN environment assembly, TEDx Atlanta, SXSW, AIA, ACUI, ASHRAE, Facades+, Tech+, Build Tech.
💪 66 out of 70 projects failed. But…
On the surface, this sounds like the record of a terrible entrepreneur.
However, most people think that Pieter Levels is just the opposite.
As a solopreneur, here are some stats from his December 2020 post.
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My revenue grew to over $1 million per year.
Traffic increased to 1.4 billion requests per year.
I'm serving over 1 million users per month.
Over 20,000 people have paid for my products now.
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Remember, he gets to keep all profits.
And by later this year, annualized revenues for one of his compnies — NomadList — is on track to be $2M, with over 50% net profit margins.
How do I know this?
Not because we were college roommates.
Instead, he publishes all his revenue, cost, and traffic metrics here.
But to get there…
Almost all of his software- and internet-based project launches failed.
See below.
This is his list of said projects.
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The takeaway?
Get more shots on goal.
Most will miss.
But that helps you make enough to “win” — defined in more diverse metrics than just net worth.
⛰️ Want a climate CEO peer group?
Great.
I have just what you need. 😇
At Entrepreneurs for Impact, we run 12-member peer groups for climate CEOs, founders, and investors across the US and Canada.
It can serve as your tribe, your mission-driven Mastermind, your personal advisory board.
Today’s members represent over $5 billion of market value and assets under management.
And they’re super human beings, too.
That’s all, y’all.
Make it a great week, because it’s usually a choice.
— Chris
🥴 P.S. Stop forcing it.
You cannot create demand.
You can only channel it.
If you think that you are creating demand for your product, you’ve doomed yourself to a lifetime of hard work and failure.
Eugene Schwartz — Legendary advertising exec & author (Breakthrough Advertising)
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Dr. Chris Wedding
Founder and Chief Catalyst, Entrepreneurs for Impact
The only peer group for growth-stage climate CEOs, founders, and investors