Fund vintage > pitch deck (#222)
Weekly Brief: 3 decisions. 3 minutes.
Welcome to Climate CEOs — where climate tech leaders navigate growth, capital, and sanity. Built from work with 300+ climate CEOs and 25 years of meditation.
This Week:
📊 Finance — Seek investors with dry powder
⚙️ Tools — Make better decisions: OOCEMR Framework
⛰️ Leadership — Take responsibility, give credit
📊 Finance
Seek investors with dry powder
To some of you, this is as obvious as a FOAK project going over budget. (Too soon?)
Others may be asking whether this powder is for explosives or cosmetic products.
Dry powder refers to the amount of capital investors have left to deploy in a fund.
Imagine two climate tech investors:
Fund A raised in 2022 and is now 3 years in.
Fund B raised in 2024 and is early in deployment.
Fund strategy changes with age. Your pitch shouldn’t ignore that.
Years 1-3 = investing aggressively
Years 4-6 = conserving capital for follow-on investment in the current portfolio
Years 7-11 = exiting
If you approach Fund A, your odds of getting an investment are as low as a VC investor who says, “Super exciting. A TAM of $100M. Please fly to meet me tomorrow.”
Choose Fund B. Go where the money is.
So what?
Audit your investor CRM. Reprioritize your target list by fund vintage and by who has the most dry powder.
Use Pitchbook, CB Insights, Crunchbase, or friends with (those) benefits to get the data you need.
⚙️ Tools
Make better decisions: OOCEMR Framework
Tony Robbins is the world’s best-known coach and strategist. Like a human espresso shot for ambition.
As a partner or owner in 100+ businesses doing $10B+ in revenue, he knows a few things about making good decisions.
Here’s his OOCEMR framework. Use it for your next capital raise, big hire, pricing shift, or plant location decision.
O – Outcome
What do I actually want?
Name the result. Not the complaint. Not the thing you’re avoiding. The scoreboard.
O – Options
What are my real choices?
If you only have one, you’re trapped. If you have two, you’re stressed. Find at least three, so your brain stops being dramatic.
C – Consequences
What do I win? What do I risk?
Play it forward. Sunshine on the upside. Punch in the mouth on the downside.
E – Evaluate
What’s likely, not just possible?
Stop planning for asteroid strikes. Optimize for probability, not paranoia.
M – Mitigate
How do I make the downside smaller?
Insurance. Pilots. Contracts. Pre-mortems. Helmets are cheaper than head trauma.
R – Resolve
Pick. Move. Own it.
No half-commitments. Decide like an adult. Execute like you mean it.
Scaling climate tech isn’t magic. It’s disciplined decision-making. Don’t wing it.
So what?
Audit your last 3 major decisions. Where did you skip a letter?
Decide which letter is your team’s weakest. And its strongest.
Create systems to fix the former and codify the latter.
⛰️ Leadership
Take responsibility, give credit
Dwight Eisenhower elaborates:
“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”
Most CEOs say they believe this. Few behave like it when things break.
So what?
Do you follow Dwight’s advice? Or do the opposite? Ask your EA or Chief of Staff for honest feedback.
Restructure your weekly memo or town hall with these two sections: “What I got wrong” and “Who crushed it this week.”
🎙️If you care about AI and wildfire risk, listen to our Climate CEOs podcast:
My final question for you:
Which OOCEMR letter do you skip under pressure?
Reply and tell me. I read them all and appreciate the input.
~ Chris
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