Inevitable

Roman Arutyunov is the Co-founder and SVP of Products at Xage Security , a Series B startup focused on protecting critical infrastructure—including energy systems—from cyber threats. Xage is backed by investors like Chevron Technology Ventures, Aramco, Piva Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Overture. Cybersecurity is a growing concern as our energy systems become more distributed, electrified, a...

Mike Schroepfer is Partner at Gigascale , a venture firm he founded and self-funded to back startups building venture-scale businesses with the potential for outsized climate impact. Previously, Mike served as CTO at Meta (Facebook’s parent company) from 2013 to 2022, having originally joined in 2008 as VP of Engineering. In this episode, Mike and Cody discuss his career journey, key lessons learn...

James McWalter is the CEO and co-founder of Paces , an AI-powered software platform that helps clean energy project developers identify and evaluate the best sites for new projects. Paces streamlines the process by integrating interconnection, environmental, zoning, and legal data on land parcels—key factors developers must navigate when selecting viable locations. MCJ is proud to be an investor i...

Cathy Zoi is a clean energy veteran with a career spanning leadership roles across government, industry, and investment. Most recently, she served as CEO of EVgo from 2017 to 2023, taking the company public in 2020. EVgo is now one of the largest EV charging networks in the United States. Today, Cathy is deeply engaged in the energy and climate space. She serves on the board of directors for Con E...

Dan Preston is the co-founder and CEO of Stand , a brand-new startup property insurer providing homeowners insurance for climate-exposed properties. They’re launching with a go-to-market focus on higher-end properties in California—homes that are otherwise unable to obtain affordable rates or any coverage at all due to wildfire risk. Stand claims that their differentiation, as Dan will explain in...

Marc Mezvinsky is a partner at TPG Rise Climate . TPG Rise Climate is among the largest pools of capital ever raised with a dedicated focus on climate tech. They announced a debut fund in 2021 at over $7 billion—and another very large fund currently in the works. Rise Climate is part of the broader TPG Rise platform, the impact arm of the publicly traded private equity firm TPG, which manages more...

Hudson Gilmer is the co-founder and CEO of LineVision .  LineVision is a Series C-stage startup helping utilities monitor and increase the capacity of the vast network of transmission lines that serve as the vascular system of the U.S. electric grid. The U.S. transmission grid spans 600,000 to 700,000 circuit miles of high-voltage lines, connecting energy generation with consumption and delivering...

John Rappaport is the Chief Investment Officer at Keyframe Capital , a special situations fund manager. They help management teams solve complex asset and corporate financing requirements. In finance speak, this is often referred to as structured capital—the process of separating a company's capital structure into layers, enabling each layer to be fit for an investor seeking that specific risk-ret...

Paul Lambert is the Co-founder and CEO of Quilt ,  a company designing smart ductless heat pumps for residential heating and cooling with intelligent room-by-room controls. Quilt was founded in 2022 and launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in spring 2024. Since then, they have achieved hundreds of deployments and are preparing to expand to their next market in Southern California. Earlier this y...

Sharon Schneider is the Founder of Integrated Capital Strategies , a consulting firm that helps founders and family offices drive positive social change. Her firm specializes in setting up or realigning family offices to better align with the values and evolving priorities of individuals seeking a more integrated approach to life. We invited Sharon on the show after being inspired by one of her po...

Eliot Brooks is the CEO and co-founder of Cocoon .  Cocoon is driving the industrial circular economy, starting with a process that helps the steel industry continue supplying a critical feedstock for cement production. This feedstock is increasingly at risk as steelmaking transitions from coal-based blast furnaces to lower-emission electric arc furnaces.  Cocoon was founded on the realization tha...

Adrian Deveny , former Director of Energy and Environmental Policy for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, was a key architect of the Biden-era climate policy agenda, including the landmark Inflation Reduction Act. In this conversation, we explore Adrian's perspective on what to expect from Washington, D.C., in the years ahead, as the federal government transitions to Republican control of...

Kathryn Bakos is the Managing Director of Finance and Resilience at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation , an applied research center within the faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Canada.  Our conversation today is all about the inevitable impacts of climate change, including floods, wildfires, and heat waves in particular, as these phenomena are Kathryn's main focus. We ta...

Seyed Madaeni is the co-founder and CEO of Verse . Verse develops software that helps organizations understand, plan, and manage clean energy. Their platform simplifies the complex clean energy procurement process, enabling companies to meet their emissions goals in the most economical way possible.  MCJ is proud to be a repeat investor in Verse through our venture capital funds, including partici...

Maria Robinson , outgoing Director of the Grid Deployment Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, joins us to share insights from her impactful tenure. Since stepping into the role in 2022, Maria has overseen $22 billion in federal funding to drive the development of new and upgraded electric infrastructure nationwide. Recorded in person at the recent Deploy conference in Washington, DC, hosted b...

Arvin Ganesan is the CEO of Fourth Power , which is developing a flexible-duration thermal energy system designed to meet the needs of an electrical grid increasingly powered by renewables. Their system heats liquid tin to extremely high temperatures, circulates it through carbon blocks for heat storage, and converts that heat back to electricity on demand via thermal photovoltaics. The technology...

Hannah Bebbington is the Head of Deployment at Frontier , an advanced market commitment created in 2022, that aims to purchase $1 billion or more of permanent carbon removal by 2030.  Founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey, Frontier has quickly become a leading force in the carbon removal space. Its portfolio includes a "who’s who" of innovators pushing the boundaries of what’s p...

Dr. Naomi Boness is the managing director of the Natural Gas Initiative and co-managing director of the Hydrogen Initiative at Stanford University. With a Ph. D. in Geophysics from Stanford and over 13 years in technical and management roles at Chevron, Dr. Boness combines deep scientific knowledge with real-world experience in energy operations. In this episode, we dive into the molecule side of...

Jason Marks is the Co-founder and CEO at TELO . TELO is developing EV pickup trucks in the footprint of a Mini Cooper with a bed the size of a Toyota Tacoma and the power of a mainstream truck.  They're focused on urban use cases for pickup trucks, whether that be a weekend adventurer who lives in a city or an organization whose employees need trucks for work in urban environments but are fed up w...

Mark Lundstrom is the founder and CEO of Radia . Radia is developing the WindRunner, the world’s largest aircraft, specifically designed to transport massive offshore wind turbine blades—some reaching the length of football fields—to onshore sites. This capability, termed "GigaWind," could redefine the scope and scale of onshore wind projects. Radia isn’t stopping at building these groundbreaking...

Tom Montag , CEO of Rubicon Carbon , joins us to discuss the world of carbon credits. Tom has had an illustrious career, previously serving as Chief Operating Officer at Bank of America, President of Global Banking and Markets, and a member of the executive management team. He joined Merrill Lynch as Executive Vice President and Head of Global Sales and Trading in 2008, just before its merger with...

Hannan Parvizian is Co-founder and CEO of Exowatt . Exowatt turned heads earlier this year when it announced a $20 million Seed round with backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Atomic, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. The company has developed a novel combined solution for energy generation and storage that concentrates heat from the sun, stores it as thermal energy, and converts it on demand t...

By now, you’ve likely noticed our refreshed look. We’re evolving the show to focus on the inevitable impacts of climate change and the groundbreaking solutions shaping our future. To kick off this next chapter our first guest on Inevitable is Tom Steyer , Co-executive Chair at Galvanized Climate Solutions , a multi-strategy investment firm focused exclusively on the climate transition. A little ov...

Climate change is inevitable. It's already here.  But at the same time, the energy transition–the rewriting of industries to be cleaner, more profitable, and more resilient–is also inevitable. Join MCJ Managing Partner Cody Simms each week as sits down with experts across sectors to explore the groundbreaking innovations and extraordinary people shaping the transition of energy and industry.   Enj...

Today on My Climate Journey, we’re bringing back a familiar voice: Jason Jacobs, Founder and Venture Partner at MCJ. In this special episode, Cody and Jason reflect on the evolution of MCJ and its mission to drive climate innovation. While this is the last episode under the My Climate Journey name, don’t worry—the show isn’t going away. The format will stay the same, but a new name is coming soon....