Tech and Trees

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. In this episode I talk to Nina Mannheimer, co-founder and CPO of Klim. Klim is a regenerative agriculture start-up from Berlin that focuses on turning agri...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. In this episode I talk to Josh Romisher, co-founder and CEO of Holocene. Holocene invests in African pre-seed climate-tech start-ups and aims to accelerate...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Jakob Bitner, co-founder and CEO of VoltStorage. Jakob co-founded VoltStorage straight out of university. The company started out...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Caitlin Wale, the founder of Kinjani. This conversation takes us back to the African continent. With Kinjani Caitlin aimes to cat...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Natalia Dorfman, founder and CEO of Kita. Kita is an insurance start-up from the UK that focuses on insuring carbon. Buying carbo...

Hallo und herzlich willkommen zum Tech and Trees Podcast. Mein Name ist Pascal Mies und wie immer geht es heute darum, wie wir bessere ClimateTech Start-Ups bauen und wie wir schneller mehr von ihnen auf die Straße bringen können. Ganz konkret geht es heute darum, wie ClimateTechs erfahrene Führungskräfte gewinnen können, wann das überhaupt Sinn macht und welche Gedanken man sich sonst gemacht hab...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Casper Rasmussen, Co-Founder of Monta. This company from Copenhagen has built a central platform that facilitates the charging pr...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to William Pelton, Co-Founder and CEO of Phytoform. Phytoform is a British ClimateTech Start-Up that contributes to making agricultu...

On this episode I talk to Florian Hildebrand, Co-Founder and CEO of Greenlyte Carbon Technologies. Greenlyte is direct air capture company that draws down carbon from the air while producing hydrogen. They have raised ten million in capital and want to grow as fast as Tesla did. Ambitious goals but if we want to fight climate change we need people thinking big. Continue listening to find out how F...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to find out how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. In this episode I talk to George Darrah, a principal at the ClimateTech-VC Systemiq Capital. George has a past in the mining and oil industry before he starte...

This time I spoke to Timur Sirman, co-founder of Magnotherm. Magnotherm is a German company that developed a magnetic cooling technology that is vastly more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than fluid-based cooling systems. By bringing this cooling technology to for example super markets Magnotherm plans to cut the energy usage and emission intensity of cooling. I spoke to Timur about...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and today I am starting a new season of Tech and Trees. After leaving Africa I took a little pause to reflect on what I wanted to do next and what I wanted to learn about. However, in the end everything will still be about the questions of how do we build better ClimateTech and how do build more of it faster. The focus is now...

This time I spoke to Jit Bhattacharya, Founder and CEO of the Kenyan electric bus company BasiGo. He is one of those people with whom I do not know where to start asking questions. Jit has spent significant time in Silicon Valley working on battery systems, then moving on to Apple, then building one of the biggest solar business in Africa, moving on to being an investor and now driving his next ve...

Having spent the past year on the African continent, I am now in the final stages of this series of African guests. This time I am talking to the economics professor and economic historian Johan Fourie. He is something like the South African Noah Yuval Harari whom most people know for his book Sapiens - A short history of mankind. Johan wrote a book as well called “Our long walk to economic freedo...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees Podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to Climate-Tech Founders, Operators, Investors and Academics who get me smarter on how to build better climate-tech companies.  This time I spoke to Martin Freimüller, Founder of Octavia Carbon - Kenya’s first ever Direct Air Capture Company. Martin is one of the people who have the ability to...

I have started to dive a bit more into the DeepTech-Space and what it takes to build such a venture. Last time, I tried to cover how to start a biotech venture as a business guy. Well, this time I approach the topic from the other side. I want to understand how a deeptech business is run on the science-side. My guest is Leah Bessa, co-founder and chief scientific officer at De Novo Foodlabs. De No...

Among all the start-ups out there, DeepTech-ventures are the most interesting to me and so I want to make an effort to interview more people who are building something really really hard. As a guy with a business background, I want to understand how to start these type of ventures without having a scientific background. My guest this time is Tasneem Karodia, co-founder of Mzansi Meat - a biotech s...

 Last time I talked to Romain Diaz Satgana, a venture capitalist who invests in climate-focused companies in Africa. This time I talk to one of the founders who was too good for Romain to pass on and compelled him to invest.. My guest is Jesse Forrester, Founder and CEO of Mazi Mobility. Jesse is building an electric motorcycle company out of Nairobi, Kenya. But he was in South Africa for a c...

My guest today is Romain Diaz, the founder and managing partner of the climate-tech VC Satgana. In the past year one climate fund after another has been raised in Europe but Satgana is special due to their geographical focus: They invest in Europe and Africa alike. Romain spent several years as an entrepreneur and venture builder on the African continent. He wants to do his part in paving the way...

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees Podcast - What are the big shifts that technology will bring about on the African continent? I spoke to the most active venture capitalist on the continent about the trends he sees. Zachariah George and his fund “Launch Africa” have made 133 investments across 22 countries over the past 2 ½ years, so he is on top of what is happening. This conversation is le...

Sometimes you start an episode and you have a good feeling right away. When I started talking to Shobhita Soor I had this feeling. She gave off a great positive vibe during our conversation which I feel stemmed from her conviction regarding her mission: making protein insufficiency and inaccessibility in West Africa a thing of the past. She does so via her company Legendary Foods - one of the firs...

The people I get to interview on Tech and Trees are different every time and all of them have different stories to share. Yet, I feel that this one turned out to be more personal than others. I talk to Armand Bam, the head of social impact at the Stellenbosch Business School. He oversees their efforts to make education more inclusive and labels himself to be an academic-activist whose opinions oft...

In this episode I am talking to Joost Boeles - A Dutchie turned start-up founder in Kenya. When I got introduced to Joost, I struggled a bit with the question of how does his business makes sense? Joost has co-founded the first e-Bike assembler in East Africa and sells them to businesses and individuals via subscription. So, Joost got told by a lot of people that this would not work - but he had a...

Building a start-up is hard. Building a start-up in South Africa is harder. To help ease the pain and assist founders in their journey accelerators are setting up shop all over the African continent. One of the most successful ones is the LaunchLab in Stellenbosch. What makes them unique is: They are not jumping on the bandwagon of investing in African FinTech. They say: we want to support founder...

In Today’s episode I am talking to Michael Maas. This interview was recorded a while back but it was special for me: It was the first time I got to interview someone in person rather than via video call. While it made me a bit more nervous as I could not hide behind my screen it was also a fantastic experience. Remote does the job but being face-to-face is just so much more fun. Michael is an earl...