What game are you playing?
Plus, 20 climate tech companies that raised $1.2B in Q4 2023. Florida yogi became billion-dollar CEO. Spray and pray. Land and expand. (vol 140)
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Today’s topics.
💰 Do you know these 20 climate tech companies that raised $1.2B in Q4 2023?
🙏 Business frameworks that rhyme: Spray and pray. Land and expand.
😖 If you don’t know what game you’re playing, you’ll lose.
🧘♀️ Surrender to succeed: Florida yogi became CEO of a billion-dollar tech co.
1.
💰 Do you know these 20 climate tech companies that raised $1.2B in Q4 2023?
Kudos to these gritty CEOs who found billions in the proverbial couch cushions.
Capital raising right now is like “chewing glass and staring into the abyss.” *
Special shout out to one of these 20 CEOs below — Dr. Megan O’Connor, CEO of Nth Cycle and member of our climate CEO peer group community at Entrepreneurs for Impact. 🎉
Source: Pitchbook
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* Thank you, Elon, for that gruesome imagery and candor.
2.
🙏 Business frameworks that rhyme: Spray and pray. Land and expand.
Fellow climate tech startup nerd * Sophie Purdom joined my Duke University class, Climate Tech Startups & Investors, this week to share insights about her journey co-creating CTVC (now a product of Sightline) and launching Planeteer Capital (lead investor on preseed and seed-stage climate tech deals).
Two fun business phrases amused the eager students during our fireside chat, so I thought I’d share.
Spray and pray
An investment strategy in preseed and seed-stage investments where you invest a similar dollar amount in many [e.g., 50-100] startups because it's hard to pick winners this early. Instead, you bet on a vintage or a subsector. It’s like an index fund approach to investing, with relatively little diligence, which might produce less volatile returns.
Land and expand
A go-to-market strategy where you “land” a client with a very niche product addressing a very focused customer need. Then you build trust, add value, and expand to more products to solve more problems for the same customer. Aka, you can’t be everything to everybody all at once.
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* Nerd is the highest praise! 👏
3.
😖 If you don’t know what game you’re playing, you’ll lose.
Better said:
Are you playing the right game?
As I transition from my morning meditation in darkness to a day full of teaching and CEO coaching, I avoid some games. But I’m stuck in others.
A reframing of the question might be even more interesting:
Can you play a game that no one else is playing?
For me, can I combine disparate experiences — private equity, PhD, ponytail, meditation — to build something that doesn’t exist? 🤔
We’ll see…
How can you create a new game to play, so that winning is more effortless?
4.
🧘♀️ Surrender to succeed: This Florida yogi became CEO of a billion-dollar tech company.
Multiple members of our climate CEO peer group highly recommended this book.
When that happens, I read it quickly.
This one was so good, it happened in a day. (Thank you, Audible.)
The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection by Michael A. Singer
Here’s the summary.
This book tells the extraordinary story of what happened when, after a deep spiritual awakening, he decided to relinquish his personal fears and desires and simply let life unfold before him. Singer shares how this pivotal decision to embrace the flow of life led him to extraordinary success, sustained him through times of crisis, and allowed him to cultivate profound inner peace—whether as a young man pursuing a life of solitude in the woods, the founder of a thriving spiritual community in Florida, or the CEO of a billion-dollar medical software company.
This prompted a great discussion in our climate CEO Zoom huddle last week:
As entrepreneurs fighting the status quo to tackle climate change, is surrendering to “what is” at odds with knocking down the walls that block our path?
The answer: No.
If we don’t surrender more often, we might:
Become exhausted from fighting every single battle.
Lose our humility to see that [life] may have a better plan for us than we had imagined.
I’ll paraphrase Tara Brach from her latest podcast:
Buddhist psychology tells us that when we “clinch the fist” (i.e., seek to control everything), we increase our suffering, limit our ability to heal, and inhibit our full human potential.
Easy to read. Hard to do.
As one of our CEOs said:
“I’ll need some time to process this. I’m a work in progress.”
Arent’ we all!
That’s all, y’all.
Make it a great week because it’s usually a choice.
~ Chris
Founder @ Entrepreneurs for Impact
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P.S. Over 100,000 CEOs are members of CEO peer groups. Are you? Check out our community for climate tech CEOs at Entrepreneurs for Impact. We’re a private community of 65 CEOs and investors representing over $15B of market value for climate solutions.
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(As these photos show, I’m an actual human writing this newsletter. Not AI. 🤖)
