Climate Tech Cocktails

Inna Braverman , co-founder and CEO of Eco Wave Power : “Offshore, the waves don’t move in one direction. Your equipment can get hit by waves that are 20 meters in height. Near the shore, there’s a phenomenon called wave run-up where they actually build near the shore, and they’re all heading in one direction. The sector should start where it’s simple, and move from there.”  - Inna Braverman, expl...

Episode Notes Greg Constantine , Co-founder and CEO of Air Company on the importance of reaching hearts and minds to combat the climate crisis: “Imagination is everything.  It’s what moves the world forward.”  - Greg Constantine , Co-founder and CEO of Air Company @ Greg Constantine , Co-founder and CEO of @ Air Company , Air company’s priority is to utilize as much CO2 as possible to slow the mom...

🎧 New podcast episode: Trevor Best , co-founder and CEO of Syzygy : “Not only eliminating emissions but making energy low-cost is very important. So, the fact that we can use low-cost, renewable electricity, the fact that we can build our reactor out of aluminum, the fact that the hyper efficient lights result in a hyper-efficient reactor - all those are important factors so that we can make prod...

Mateo Jaramillo , co-founder and CEO of Form Energy , on the importance of long-term energy storage: “Lithium Ion will continue to have a very important role to play, but there remains a key function which needs to be replaced on the grid, and that is a function that is currently being provided by coal and natural gas. That is the energy demand when you don’t have wind or solar. So, that’s the kin...

Brett Thompson , co-founder and CEO of Mzansi Meat , on effective solutions in food systems: “I think there needs to be a bouquet of solutions. I don’t think plant-based is the only solution; I don’t think unprocessed, regenerative farming, any of those things alone are solutions  - rather I think you need to add a hell of a lot of things to it. And I think cultivated meat adds to that, because th...

Raymond Weitekamp , Founder and CEO of polySpectra ,  on moving towards massless: “PolySpectra A.R. is our new augmented reality tool to give massless prototypes to people in product development. The massless mission is to leverage distributed digital manufacturing to reduce global energy usage by 25% by 2050.” Using the world’s most rugged photopolymer resins, Raymond’s company is also helping en...

Manik Suri, Founder and CEO of Therma , on Smart Refrigeration: “As we move into a world where we have more electrification and move off fossil fuels, we’re going to need a lot more utility infrastructure, so utilities are looking for ways to create extra capacity… We’re starting to think of refrigeration as a battery; we’ve kept that battery at one hundred percent charge for the last hundred year...

Stephane Germain , Founder and President of GHGSat , on the need to address methane emissions: “95% of what (methane) we detect isn’t acted upon today, and that drives me bonkers.” GHGSat developed the first sensor for small satellites that can detect methane (CH4) emissions and locate individual sources of CH4 from around 500km above the Earth's surface - a huge leap forward in global emissions m...

Tessa Clarke , Co-founder and CEO of O LIO on the size of the food waste crisis: “If it were a country, food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emission after the USA and China, and that’s because a landmass larger than China is used every single year to grow food that is never eaten.” OLIO connects neighbours with each other and with local businesses so surplus food can be...

Maddie Hall , Co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon , on falling in love with plants: “Our little portion of human history is small compared to all of the plant life this planet has seen.” Living Carbon’s mission is to responsibly rebalance the planet’s carbon cycle using the inherent power of plants. Living Carbon is growing genetically modified poplars and pines capable of absorbing much more carb...

Arturo Elizondo , Founder and CEO of The EVERY Company , on his life’s purpose: “I fundamentally believe my purpose on this Earth is to help enable a shutdown of the last factory farm in the world.” EVERY exists to produce proteins that are better for people, the planet, and animals. Under Arturo’s leadership, the company has raised over $230 million dollars in capital from leading venture investo...

Etosha Cave , Co-founder and CSO of Twelve , on the sacrifices she made while launching Twelve: “I had no money.  I was living out of my car at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.” Etosha became passionate about energy and climate change while growing up in Houston, and she went on to receive her PhD from Stanford University focusing on electrochemical approaches that could be used to convert CO2 and...

👩‍✈️ Jennifer Holmgren , CEO of LanzaTech on the premise of LanzaTech: “What we need to come to is a world where there is no such thing as waste.  Where waste is feedstock or the way you make everything else.” Jennifer has over 20 years of experience in the energy sector including a proven track record in the development and commercialization of fuels and chemicals technologies. Prior to LanzaTec...

Kevin Martin , Co-founder and CTO at unspun on the inefficiency of the current apparel manufacturing process: “It’s a $1.5 trillion dollar industry where 10-15% of everything produced every year gets burned and destroyed without ever being sold.” Unspun is a robotics and digital apparel company building custom jeans for each consumer, on-demand. Their mission is to reduce global carbon emissions b...

Raphael Haupt , Founder and Chief Toucan at Toucan Protocol on the need for an all of the above solutions approach to carbon drawdown. “Let’s unf*ck the environment…the only thing that’s clear is that the price of carbon needs to increase.”  - Raphael Haupt , Founder and Chief Toucan at Toucan Protocol Toucan is working to make DeFi work for the planet by building market infrastructure to bring ca...

Greg Constantine , Co-founder and CEO of Air Company on the importance of reaching hearts and minds to combat the climate crisis: “Imagination is everything.  It’s what moves the world forward.”  - Greg Constantine , Co-founder and CEO of Air Company @ Greg Constantine , Co-founder and CEO of @ Air Company , Air company’s priority is to utilize as much CO2 as possible to slow the momentum of clima...

Ryan Pandya , Co-founder and CEO of Perfect Day on how nobody was working on microbe based dairy in 2014: “I will live and die never again having an idea that you can’t find on the internet.”  - Ryan Pandya , Co-founder and CEO of Perfect Day @ Ryan Pandya , Co-founder and CEO of @ Perfect Day , a consumer biology company on a mission to create a kinder, greener tomorrow by developing new ways to...

On their creation Tikkun Olunch, based on the Jewish tradition of Tikkun Olam, ”These lunches were an opportunity for us to get together once a week and ask, ‘Are you doing the most you can possibly do to make the world a better place?  How can I help you think through that and how can I help you step up your game?’ - Amanda Joy Ravenhill , Executive Director of The Buckminster Fuller Institute @...

“I like to say we’re not a mission driven company.  We’re not a company with a mission.   We’re a mission with a company.”  - Ryan Shearman , Co-founder and CEO of Aether Diamonds @ RyanShearmanNYC , Co-founder and CEO of @ AetherDiamonds , a startup creating the world’s first positive-impact diamonds.  Ryan Shearman is a mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur. Early in his career, Ryan joined Da...

“How is everyone not working on climate change?...In my understanding of the science, I would say it will define the lives of people in my generation.”  - Kathy Hannun , Founder and President of Dandelion Energy @ KathyHannun , Founder and President of @ DandelionEnergy , the largest residential geothermal company in the United States.  Before founding Dandelion, Hannun was a Rapid Evaluator at X,...

“If the next 4 billion ACs are all heat pumps, they can also decarbonize heating while we’re expanding access to AC. If they have low carbon refrigerants we can solve the refrigerant problem.  Lastly, if we make sure they’re all smart and WiFi connected we can help modernize the grid at the same time and have more solar and wind on the grid.”  - Vince Romanin , Co-founder and CEO of Gradient .   V...

“Globally we’re emitting about 5 Gigatons of CO2 from Diesel engines every year...so you’re looking at about 15% total emissions coming from that fuel in particular.”  - BJ Johnson , Co-founder and CEO of ClearFlame Engines .   BJ Johnson ( @bj_johnson87 ) is CEO and Co-founder of ClearFlame Engines (@ ClearFlameEng ), which is a startup taking the diesel fuel out of the diesel engine for heavy-du...

“(in 10 years) The grid is a decarbonized, decentralized, and digitized network taking full advantage of the network effects that we all enjoy in a modern technology stack.”  - Gregg Dixon , Co-founder and CEO of Voltus Gregg Dixon ( @gregg_dixon ) is the Co-founder and CEO of Voltus (@ voltusinc ), connecting customers, investors, teammates, and the world with Voltus value, ensuring that the visi...

“The more I looked into it, the more broken the pet food industry was.  It accounts for 25-30% of meat consumed in the U.S...it just makes no sense because we can make protein out of yeast, out of fungi, out of plants...and so I’m like, somebody needs to start this company.”  - Ryan Bethencourt , Co-founder and CEO of Wild Earth .   Ryan Bethencourt ( @ryanbethencourt ) is a co-founder and CEO at...

“We need to make poop the new gold.  We need to give new ways for poop to become the input, and for antibiotics to become the output...or for polymers or for bioplastics to become the output.  That just means cozying up with bacteria, because they can do it.”  - Sarah Richardson , Co-founder and CEO, MicroByre Sarah is a computationally inclined microbiologist and science communicator: she speaks...