Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. This episode is a little different. Somil Aggarwal and Silas Mähner are the hosts of another Climate Tech podcast. No wait, well, you know what I mean a different Climate Tech podcast, one that isn't this one. They're the hosts of Clean Techies Podcasts based out of New York, and they graciously reached out to me to ask if I'd like to be a guest on one of their episodes. Instead, we decided to do an interview of each other and to syndicate it on both of our podcasts on the same day. This was loads of fun and I enjoyed being able to play the interviewee for once. And if you're listening to this episode close to its release date, happy holidays to you and yours. I'm Ryan Grant Little Thanks, as always, for being here.

Silas Mähner: 1:30

All right, welcome to the show, Ryan. How are you?

Ryan Grant Little: 1:34

Great to see you guys.

Silas Mähner: 1:38

This is going to be a very, very fun episode for us. I feel like we do a lot of time behind the questions, but now we actually get to do a little more of the talking. Ryan, you actually run your own podcast. This is an opportunity for us to get to know each other and just talk about the climate media space and the climate podcasting space in general. We have obviously gone back and forth quite a while. We know each other and we've shared a lot of notes, but could you just introduce yourself for the audience, who you are, what you do and how you ended up with the podcast?

Ryan Grant Little: 2:08

Sure, this is the episode where the interviewers get interviewed, I guess right On both sides. I was really happy to hear from you guys when you reached out. So you're based in New York, I'm in Vienna. We both have climate tech podcasts. I think mine is probably a bit more Eurocentric, yours is more US-centric.

Ryan Grant Little: 2:29

My podcast is called Another Climate Tech Podcast. We aptly called that and the reason I did it. So I'm an investor advisor consultant in climate tech and I just get to have really interesting conversations with people all the time, whether they're activists to investors, to people in the arts and, of course, lots of founders, and I thought would it be cool if I could just hit record once a week and put one of these stories kind of out there? There are so many podcasts that interview founders of tech companies and SaaS and these types of things, but we don't really celebrate a lot the people who are kind of what I talked about as like solving the problems that really matter and that I talked about this podcast as being interviews with the people who are trying to save us from ourselves, and they tend to be very selfless people who are working in labs or not on the covers of magazines, but doing some of the most important stuff in the world right now, given our climate crisis.

Somil Aggarwal: 3:34

Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting. A lot of people criticize people for making another podcast and all these things, but I think that some people just overlook how much fun it is to actually get to talk to people. And it's also for people like myself. When I started this, it was a really good reason to get people on the phone so I could actually talk to them and learn right, because people do like to talk about themselves just a little.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:56

One of the things I tell people to do with the episodes is look, this is your 30 minutes of explaining what you do, telling your story. And so now when people, especially in Europe, get a lot of requests from bachelor students like who are interested in climate tech or kind of, they want that 30 minute zoom to hear kind of the one on one about what you do. And I said, now you've got this in the can, you can basically just put this in your email signature or send it to people and say listen to this first and if you have any follow up questions, then send me an email. And I've had people you know some of the early guests on the show are like you don't know how many hours it saved me now that I've done this interview. So I feel like you know we're telling stories for people in the sector, so that's a service in and of itself, but we're also saving time right so that they don't have to tell the same story over and over, one on one.

Somil Aggarwal: 4:46

Yeah, there's so many things, so many things you can do with that. Yeah, I totally agree, that's a really good way.

Silas Mähner: 4:52

I'll tell some of my guests that I'm up. I'm going to tip a question for the both of you, so this is going to be a bit of a breaking the third wall. I feel like I'm going to have a lot of fun hearing this. So, ryan, why the 30 minute episode like? Why the shorter episode format and then silence? I'm going to have you directly say something negative about it. I'm just kidding. You defend the hour and a half long format. I'm just interested to highlight that for the audience, the stylistic choices there.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:19

I don't. I mean I don't know if I could prepare An hour and a half of talking every week for it. You know, and I I'm a huge podcast listener myself and I love 30 minute episodes because it's always like it's just the right amount of time for me to do, you know, whatever I'm going to do. So that kind of seems to just just work for me. But to be honest, like I don't know, I mean I tend to. Maybe it's because I'm a one man operation, both with the podcast and in my business and everything like that. Time is really of the essence. Time is the resource I have the least of, and so I guess I try to. That's sort of just a natural thing for me, and I try to keep a lot of my meetings to 30 minutes, so it's just kind of like a comfort thing, I guess. And you know, some of them will run a little bit longer, but I don't have maybe I don't have enough to say how did you guys decide on the longer version?

Somil Aggarwal: 6:17

Yeah, I mean, I think for me.

Somil Aggarwal: 6:19

So originally we were doing mostly just one hour episodes, and that was the way I looked at it originally was hey, let's do it, it's long enough that you can actually build rapport with somebody and you can actually get a pretty good amount of stuff covered in that time, but it's also not too much time commitment.

Somil Aggarwal: 6:34

But with going with the one hour and a half episodes, it's what we've realized with, especially with the VCs is there's a lot that is not said and we miss a lot of things, right?

Somil Aggarwal: 6:43

So if we're going to get them once in every couple of years, right, because we only have so much time as well to interview them, we're going to try to get as much out of it as we can and really get some holistic viewpoints on what's going on, because my favorite episodes of podcasts are actually generally longer ones, right, I really do like when it's a really good guest to listen for a long time, because if they're really good, it's just like a good book, right, they say you want to read the good books, you don't want to just read any book, right? So that's kind of how I look at it with what we're doing now is, I really believe that some of the people we're getting on are just truly incredible thought leaders in this space and we should hear more from them, not just an hour, because we can't get through their story plus what they think about their thesis, and then also the insights of the market in an hour. Right, it just doesn't. It doesn't work.

Ryan Grant Little: 7:27

That's probably. I mean that's a really good point and you're right. I mean you do get to kind of like ask that second why? And kind of go deeper. I guess I should say also that I generally do talk to them for an hour. It's just that the episode is half an hour and I use it because I'm investing. I've made a lot of investments. A lot of the people I'm talking to are people I know and I'm working with in different ways, and so a lot of times I'll book an hour with them and we'll talk for half an hour and then we'll record for half an hour and it's kind of more like what are you working on? What are you excited about? Where can people reach you? So I guess maybe that's a core difference is I'm not aiming to go too deep and a lot of it's kind of like introductory to different topics or different things that folks are working on.

Silas Mähner: 8:15

Yeah that makes a lot of sense.

Silas Mähner: 8:18

I can also add an additional point, which is one thing kind of plugging a new format which will be hitting the audience I think by the time this episode is out it'll already be live but this is something that we're rolling out new, which is an hour and a half long episode, and I think that's why it's topical for us.

Silas Mähner: 8:34

I feel like this is also just the case where, like, look, you're a consumer of media right and there's so many different podcasts. So if you're looking to get a generic profile of some of the people you're talking to, it's probably been done two or three times like this. I mean, sometimes you are, but you're probably not their first podcast appearance. So I feel like one thing that's really interesting is being able to get nuance within your show right and go into a segment or a strength area of the guest that really fits them that may not show up in other content, and I think that's something that we're, like Silas and I are always aspiring to. And again, like you said, fair Play, you do sort of that prep session and then you probably do learn a little more about what they're good about. But I think that's just a really something that I aspire to see in our episodes, which is did we produce something that isn't found on any other platform?

Ryan Grant Little: 9:26

Yeah, that's awesome, and getting that kind of depth out there, I think, is really important, definitely, and I love listening to your podcast for that reason. And maybe a question for you also is so you have a longer podcast, you have a newsletter, you're building a community. How do you, how do you do it all? I mean, how do you do this every week? And for me also, I always think about the newsletters being like a very challenging thing. It's not something that I'm working on. I'll just sort of post it on LinkedIn and be done with it. How do you, how do you build this and how do you decide on what assets you're going to deploy?

Somil Aggarwal: 10:10

Yeah, I mean I think from the just looking at it all generally like we try to do as much as streamlined as possible, so we usually don't have to do too much editing to the episodes. We have somebody who does that for us, so that helps it. We do a pretty good job of taking timestamps throughout so we can just say, hey, once you add the intro and all those stuff, just make sure you remark those episodes or those, those timestamps, and then a couple interesting clips, right. But in terms of the, there's just a lot of value to written content is what we realize that a lot of people, they are very busy, so there's a lot of very, very interesting things being said by the guests.

Somil Aggarwal: 10:43

But with an audio format it's not like you can just skim, read, right, you cannot skim listen to something. You can listen very fast, but you still kind of have to listen to all of it and, as you can see, see it right. So the newsletter is in an attempt to really get the big pieces onto paper so somebody can, with their limited time, be like all right, I've got, you know, 15 minutes. Right now I'm going to listen to that section because that seems very interesting and it's interesting for me as an investor.

Somil Aggarwal: 11:10

I want to know what people are thinking about this or that, and I believe that's important because that's the purpose that we're trying to achieve is like, can people get the value? We don't need them to listen to the whole thing. So, in terms of the workflow, I'll just say this much I am not great at writing, so Mill is much better at this stuff than I am, so that he's behind a lot of this stuff, making it actually look good and doing the work there. So I can't take credit for most of that. So yeah, that's kind of the background, I would say. On the workflow.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:38

How did you guys decide to do a podcast?

Silas Mähner: 11:40

together I can. I could probably answer that. So I came from a written news. That are background and, silas, I'd obviously built up a platform for about, I think, two years at that point, and so I think we we just connected over, I think, a shared like work ethic, a shared mission for the content that we're getting out there and probably, you know frankly, a shared like craziness with hustle.

Silas Mähner: 12:01

I don't know if we're both sort of scrappy and not the most organized ways, but I think it works well in terms of the way the things that we bring to that scrappiness. So I think that sort of synergy in the vision, that because I think one of the things that and Silas, like, feel free to contribute, like when you're building something as a morphis, as a Climate tech podcast, right, especially in a very undefined space such as climate, where people don't even really know what it is, it's totally on your shoulders to be able to bring up this kind of a media engine, right. So you have a lot of different decisions all the time. So I think finding someone who's aligned with the vision that you have for the thing that you're doing is Probably the most important thing, because I think Silas and I could probably spend three hours a week just wasting time if we Disagreed on where things should be going.

Somil Aggarwal: 12:47

So yeah, I mean, I was it from my perspective. I have been doing the show for, I think, two years in a couple months and then I like. So now I bumped into each other in New York because you came down for a visit at one point before you lived here and I was like I think this guy's doing some interesting things. He like he's in the content game or whatever.

Somil Aggarwal: 13:06

But I was also like I've basically just been an autopilot with the podcast for a while and I was like at that time I had been probably doing almost three to four recordings a week because there was so many people coming in and I hated to have people know. So I was like I just want help with this, right, I want somebody who can help me do these things and hopefully eventually make money with it. I will say it because it costs money to make a podcast, right, so ideally, start getting some some making some money with it. So yeah, and I think it's been great because our growth has been pretty, pretty substantial since so much on. So I'm pretty sure that's mostly due to him.

Ryan Grant Little: 13:43

I just realized we should probably split the cost of editing for this podcast.

Silas Mähner: 13:55

Send me a bill.

Ryan Grant Little: 13:56

That's really cool. And so in your both base in in New York City and what else, I mean, what are the other things that you do? And probably your audience knows this pretty, pretty well, but mine won't like. What else do you do with your you know, with your days if this isn't paying the bills?

Somil Aggarwal: 14:12

Yeah, I can go first. My day job is I'm a recruiter in the climate and sustainability space. I work with the company Oops, somebody's at my door. I work with the company called Next Way Partners. We're globally based out of Singapore, but I lead our climate sustainability team for the Americas and then helping out with Europe as well, so that's that's what pays my bills.

Silas Mähner: 14:31

Yeah, I can. I can take over NSF's and jump for a second. But so my background? I work in product I I'm working at the Schmidt Futures Foundation, but also to do product support right now Actually an elemental accelerator. You know, I have a background. I spent some time at VC at an early stage seed startup, seed stage investment group, and before that I founded a company in AgTech. So I think my background really just come from more of a fundamental product side Combined with, like that vision on how do you grow, how do you scale and how do you bring things to market, which is, I think, usually how people who come from founding relate to investing, which is how do you bring this product to market, rather than how do you like make money off of this invention have we and you know for our audience? Please tell us a little bit more in detail about your background.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:23

So my background I'm a founder by background. I started as a teenager and had a like a B2B e-commerce company which I sold and then used the proceeds to set up like a Donations platform in Canada, where I'm from originally, and so my unicorn is kind of like a nonprofit basically, but it's kind of the. The center of Canada's digital philanthropy is called Canada helps, and working with that and running, you know, founding that and then running it for a while got me really hooked on impact and that impact kind of shifted. Or I mean, it was always very much focused on environment. So I was the kid who was an insomniac because I was worried about global warming. You know when and before it was cool to worry about it and it's never gone away. That sort of climate anxiety and seeing that, you know the numbers just don't make sense. And back then it was like you know, we were talking about the ozone layer and acid rain. I've got a few years on, you guys and and that never went away. And then in the mid 2000s I decided I wanted to get into renewable energy and built a biogas company that we sold in in 2010 and I decided to kind of shake things up.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:41

Move to Europe. I moved to Berlin and for about 10 years there in Berlin I worked with social entrepreneurs. I've worked a lot to help kind of build the social enterprise world environment there out of Berlin and make some other things. So again, my kind of my I've always been sort of a picks and shovels about the kind of capacity building for these kinds of sectors. So I did that for that kind of work for a long time and then kind of stepped out as an into independent consulting in the impact space, designing accelerators and things like that for for environmental and socially impactful companies.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:35

And one of my clients was, as a consultant, was a Just a pure B2B SaaS company and the founder basically asked if I'd step in and take it over and build it up and sell it.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:52

And so I did that and made a couple of bucks out of that and I decided ahead of time that 100% of whatever I make from that I'll put into impact investing. And then I so basically had to create a my own blueprint or strategy for what I want to invest in. And that forces you to think a lot about your values and kind of what matters to you, and I realized again it's really about climate and and largely about animals also. So that brought me into kind of the alternative protein space, which is, you know, a subset of climate tech. Basically, you know, and that's two or three years ago now, so it's all you know as these things when you look back on it you can create a narrative. When it's all in front of you, you're just kind of following a thread and hoping it works out, and so you know, it's always been about entrepreneurship and and climate.

Somil Aggarwal: 18:49

Yeah, I think it's really. I really appreciate hearing the background. This is something that I feel like is my favorite thing about what I've learned from doing the podcast is everybody, no matter how successful they are, from like a current perspective, you look at them, they're running a big fund, they're doing lots of great investments and their investments are winning. They all had very large amounts of uncertainty early in their career. Right, they did not know oh, I'm going to go do this and then this, and then this is going to be great. Right, it was more like, oh my gosh, what's next? Like I guess I'll do the thing in front of me, right, and I appreciate that background. What one thing I did want to ask you, though, is specifically, since you have all these things you've done and kind of work on, how do you decide what to do versus what not to do?

Ryan Grant Little: 19:38

I mean, it's a good question and I, you know, as with a lot of people, I probably take on more than I I should. I think it's really important to know what you're good at and what you're not good at and to focus on like doubling down on the things you are good at and trying to like not become really good at the things you're not good at. I guess you know. So what, what I like doing, what I, the role I play, you know pretty well, I think, is as kind of like a catalyst and as an integrator, and so I'm pretty good at kind of seeing, like you know, it makes sense for this person to be in the room and that person in the room and to have this kind of conversation and to facilitate that and and to learn from different industries. I've, you know, across all kinds of different industries and I can borrow kind of interesting things are things that have worked from one and bring it into another, you know, and, and so I like to play this, I like to start things, I like to kind of kick them off, bring the right people, bring the right ideas together and then let them kind of gather some momentum and then, once things are going, then I usually want to move on to the next thing and and try that, that again and, and you know, build in some of the structures but and some of the scaffolding to make that.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:58

I can't really talk about that at all, but I like to kind of move on. So I'm a really early stage person. That that's interesting to me and I think I work a lot with you know. I'm a people person. I'm not I'm not the guy who's sitting there on excel at midnight trying to figure out, you know, trying to tweak the model and stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean, it's anything where I see that I can bring people together and kind of like, you know, influence, a movement in the old school term of influence, not the Instagram version of it. That's where I see I can play a role and where I've been successful before and you know, and quite often with the idea generation aspect of it as well.

Somil Aggarwal: 21:49

Yes, yeah, I guess one thing I'm curious about is when you talk about being an integrator and being a people person, connecting people, et cetera, do you? This is something I felt like I'm quite good at and I've always thought about where is the best type of job for those people, because usually hanging out and connecting people doesn't necessarily pay the bills right Sometimes, but usually not. What is the best type of job for those types of people who are not a technical expert? They're not a commercial expert, they just really good at connecting dots.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:22

Yeah, I mean it's a good question and through the years, a lot of the work that I do, sometimes I have to just stop and be like, okay, I need to get paid for some of this stuff and a lot of it I end up just doing and somewhere you'll find a way and making deals. If you're that kind of person, you're probably making some kinds of deals. And if you're making deals and you watch out for it, then there are ways to make money doing it right. But you have to kind of be conscious of it and find ways to charge for that, the value that you're creating, because it's very easy to do. I make a lot of introductions and stuff like that and a lot of them end up being an introduction between an investor and a startup and that results in a deal happening and stuff like that. So you have to build out more and more roles as an advisor or be kind of like just available on retainer for strategic advice for a company. That's fundraising. Potentially. I think, having been through the financing rounds as an entrepreneur, but then also having now been an investor, you've got some value you can bring to the table to, especially first time founders who are going through that process. So a lot of times people will bring me on as a coach, slash therapist, slash guy who makes introductions and stuff like that for the fundraising rounds.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:00

I like doing that. But yeah, I do a lot of free stuff. I do a lot of volunteering and that type of thing. For me, money's never been a driver and a good in and of itself. Money's only interesting for me in terms of being able to solve other problems or that type of thing. My own personal lifestyle and stuff like that is pretty modest and I'm not like I like scaling things, I like scaling ideas. I'm not interested in having a big bank account for the sake of it, but I mean, silas, you're a headhunter. I would imagine exactly the type of role where relationships really matter and connecting the dots pays off financially in a pretty direct way.

Somil Aggarwal: 24:53

Yeah, I mean it definitely is. I think that the difficulty I usually run into is that there's so many people that I want to help and I can very easily get really like my Saturdays are totally shot, type of thing, because I was like, oh, I'll help you, I'll make intros to these six people I can think of. However, that still takes time because you can't just make a mass text and send it. You have to do it in a nuanced way, otherwise the relationship is compromised, which is like scaling relationships isn't actually possible. I don't believe there's such ways. You can do it systematically, but you cannot scale something because it needs to be personal. That's usually why I ask that question is because there's so many free things I try to do to help people out, because there's reciprocity that will come back at some point. But it's like, where do you draw the line?

Ryan Grant Little: 25:41

Yeah, I mean, that's a good example, this classic thing of like could I borrow a half an hour of your time? And it's like okay, but that half hour is then like but can I then send you my deck when I've redone it and can you make these intros? It becomes a amorphous blob and it's a forever commitment for the rest of their lives kind of thing.

Ryan Grant Little: 26:04

So that becomes challenging. I do a lot of coaching and accelerators as well. Accelerators will hire me to do pitch coaching or to make do investment readiness. Those are just basically excuses to jump in on a startup strategy. Overall, right, but one of them, one team, was talking to me recently and they're like going through their auto email or CRM thing and trying to go through that. Is this good language to send to a VC? Maybe, but it's not good language to send to your list of 800 VCs. That's not the approach. Like well, what if we tweak it like this? It's not the point's not to tweak it. The point is get a warm introduction or follow these up or figure out what this investor is really interested in. But indeed it's not an issue of technology. It's an issue of political capital. In the end, all of this stuff, so much of it comes down to relationships and that's because that's human nature and it's important. None of this is a technology issue.

Somil Aggarwal: 27:08

Yeah, my first boss, his biggest thing to me was he was like the number one asset in business his contacts. He started a company with like 300 bucks and sold it for a hundred million and it was because he knew somebody he was able to go and get some kind of contracts and stuff like that. So, yeah, I think it's really important. This is something I kind of fundamentally I don't know, maybe it's philosophically struggle with. Is that in this age of all of this technology and AI and everything it's like, human connection is needed more than ever, especially if you're going to solve problems and do things and partner with other people. But people are all trying to find shortcuts and I think that for some reason, the newer generation of entrepreneurs, generally speaking, doesn't realize that there is no shortcut to just talking to people.

Somil Aggarwal: 28:48

I mean the junior candidates I talked to. There's so many of them. I try not to talk to them as much anymore. I made some blog posts to send them so they can like here's my advice. But in a blog post saves me 30 minutes. And none of them almost none of them network with people ahead of time. They only network when they need a job and I'm like okay, that's the purpose, because now you're coming asking for something rather than giving something, and that is the exact reason why people don't want to take your call or my call. Because of you, right? Because of these people who are just asking.

Silas Mähner: 29:22

I think there's like if for some reason, we get on the radar of all in the all-in podcast. I will say I might be misquoting them, but I think I either read this I either heard this. There came across this in writing about, like our generation of 25 year old entrepreneurs and how there was this like swath of like again, like mid-20s level entrepreneurs Bill Gates was earlier Mark Zuckerberg just swat the people who sort of changed the industry at the young, like within their mid-20s, and part of it was their ability to dream different and think different and asking you know, where is that? In this day and age, entrepreneurs are generally trending older.

Silas Mähner: 30:05

One thing I find interesting is that is also what is like a core tenant of venture capital, which is, you know, even outside of the advice, even outside of the way that you can help a company like survive some tough times. It's you know, I'm a VC who can introduce you to 20 customers. I'm a VC who can introduce you to your acquisition partner. So I think networking as an industry has also become more institutionalized. That may. That's something that I feel, especially if you look at and this is something that you know I have a real passion in. I think Silas has. You know we've talked about in the past.

Silas Mähner: 30:37

If you look at how other entrepreneurial ecosystems work so take East Africa, for example you see in places like these, where the sophistication level of the, the capital stack is just not as strong and especially related to climate tech like there's, there's momentum, but there's not as much as you see as, like the IRA, there's a huge premium now in the US on like this institutionalized networking.

Silas Mähner: 31:00

Like I'm not just gonna network for you, let me put my money with you as a VC and then I'll network for you. Right, and so I think that's done something to the entrepreneurial ecosystem where it's put up these guardrails and you know, just, and I wouldn't say it's stifled innovation, because you know the point of venture capital is to to invest very risky solutions but I think it's done something to the way that people look at entrepreneurship. And now entrepreneurship isn't just building a company and getting it to market, it's you have an idea, you go to an accelerator, you go to an incubator, you then talk to a VC, you then build a product, but don't really build a product because you're still trying to sell it. Right, and we're probably propagating some of this, but there's almost a formula to it which I think is taking away from the actual ability to create this like momentous generation changing technology.

Ryan Grant Little: 31:48

Well, and it comes back to Silas's point about shortcuts also, and like I mean the, the risk is that people spend too much time reading top 10 hack lists on LinkedIn about how to secure VC money and less time, you know, fiddling in the garage on the product, right, and that's so. I think you know the older vintage of entrepreneurs. Maybe was you know, like, spending a little more time on the thing itself and a little less of the meta time of, like you know, wondering what it means to be a founder and like joining the founder club and doing these kinds of things, spending more time on, like, building the actual thing, and I think that's probably pretty healthy, that kind of approach I do. I do feel these days that the some of the and I see this, you know I'm invested in a lot of startups and I see this sometimes that, like, the goal is to, you know, raise this money and the. The example I use or the metaphor I use is like, look, the hard part about running a marathon is not signing up, it's running the marathon right. And like, getting the financing in a lot of ways is just the signing up part right, like you're signing up for the hard part by getting the money in.

Ryan Grant Little: 33:02

Sure, it's not easy to get the money in, but but people kind of you can lose sight of this right and becomes about the lifestyle and you know about, like, like I'm the founder, I'm the I'm supposed to be, a particular way I have to, you know, do my TEDx talk and that's kind of the feather in my hat, but and you know so many as a product guy like you know that, like, what it comes down to is do you have to have a good product? That's, you know, that's a, that's a solution for a problem that exists and has product market, market fit and stuff like that. And then you know, then, the goal of, as of the entrepreneurs, like, sell the thing, scale the thing right, and it's like this is the, this is important, make it real right and and yeah so. But I can imagine you know I'm I'm pretty sucked into LinkedIn and you see a lot of it there.

Ryan Grant Little: 33:55

I'm, you know, by the grace of God, not on Instagram or or TikTok or any of these places, but I imagine it's even worse there, where it's like this is what it means to be a founder, like what it. You know, ten things that that successful founders do in 2023? Wake up at 5 30 in the morning, drink you know, do the Huberman routine and these kinds of things. So you know and it's all. It's all about the lifestyle of the founder and it's away from you. Know what it is to like build something that the world needs and scale it up it's so.

Silas Mähner: 34:28

It's so funny how revolutionary like I think we see this in our journeys how revolutionary it is to tell entrepreneurs to think about why they're raising money like that for some reason. I think disproportionately is a very hard-hitting piece of advice, because I think we've become the sort of rat race of like following this formula which is, you know, for many technologies. It works. But I think the big question is okay, if we haven't solved climate yet, we're likely not gonna do it, doing the same exact things we've always done, and I think that's this genesis for a lot of these new models and things like that. So, very much, like you're saying, going back to the fundamentals of, okay, my only goal is to see this technology out there, and how do I do that? And thinking from that point of view, instead of, okay, how do I raise, how do I get this VCA to back me? You know what I mean, because those are all means to an end.

Silas Mähner: 35:15

Exactly one thing, yeah, one thing I do want to do, since we have, like, all, like a lot of the content, minds, people who are ingesting content, let's, let's do some synthesis of that. So I'm gonna put you guys on the spot. Climate in general, which, based on like the things and we'll go around the horn and each answer which industry area do you think is that you're like? Do you think you're particularly bullish on that? You want to see more guests or more coverage of?

Somil Aggarwal: 36:26

so how does he want to start? Sure, I think in terms this might seem just a little too general, but the thing I think is most important is still hardware related stuff industrial decarbonization, because it is extremely difficult and it's much, much different than building a software climate startup, because software you know, so you can still generally follow the formula. Things are there, but for most of the guests that we've had on the hardest ones, the hardware isn't. Obviously there's the science risk and engineering risk, but there's also how do you position your product to who you're selling to? So if you're selling to you know some type of manufacturer of products, you cannot risk their equipment being damaged by your new chemicals that go in it or whatnot.

Somil Aggarwal: 37:10

So I think that there should be more ecosystems. I don't necessarily know, it's about coverage perhaps but there should be more ecosystems created that really do a good job of getting everybody, every single stakeholder, involved in that space who is interested in actually decarbonizing, and maybe even the ones who aren't, maybe the ones who are just they're looking to save a buck, right, because they always want to save money. Getting them to a table, then you can really start to make make headway, because otherwise you've got these really, you know, climate motivated people who are passionate and trying to build something, trying to sell, perhaps to the wrong person at the company or selling to the wrong person in the entire value chain. So I think that that space generally is the space I'm most excited to see more ecosystem and coverage on.

Ryan Grant Little: 37:59

You know it's everything right, and in 10 years we won't be talking about climate tech. We'll just be talking about the way. We don't talk about internet companies now, but in 2000, we would talk about an internet company, right? This will be inside everything, right. Everything we do, from architecture, building, electricity, mobility, food all of these things will be climate tech inside, you know. So it'll be a fundamental like. This is probably the biggest shift in generations or centuries in terms of how the world kind of exists.

Ryan Grant Little: 38:31

For me it's food, it's the food industry, and for a number of reasons. One, it's low-hanging fruit. You know I'm invested largely in alternate proteins, that's, you know, plant-based meat, fermentation and cultivated meat. So that's like cell-grown, real meat. What I like about this space is a few things. One, it's not as sexy as like the Tesla or the flying, you know, electric plane and these types of things, so there's kind of less attention paid to it. That means there's more opportunity a lot of times as an investor. So the food industry is responsible for 30% of CO2. It gets about 12% of climate tech investment, right. So that for me already shows an inefficiency. That's an opportunity. I like that, right. I like that kind of dynamic. But what I also really like about the industry is like we're months or years away from meat from alternative protein sources, tasting like meat from animals, right, and for that to be on par with taste, price and accessibility. They will be healthier for a number of reasons and it'll be better for the environment, but people don't care about that fundamentally. Right, they'll say they do, but they want it to be cheap, taste good and be easy to buy. And so that you know that's going to revolutionize the entire food industry. It's not going to disrupt the meat industry as it is right now. It's going to transform it because it's going to be with the Cargills and the JBSs, right, it's going to be with these companies and we see them, you know, investing in it when they're not trying to fight it. You know it's still kind of like the schizophrenic approach to it of trying to fight it but also trying to accept it. The same way, we see kind of some of the you know oil and gas companies with renewable energy. They're like investing on this with this pocket and funding lobbying groups to shut it down on with the other, with the other pocket. So we're going through this kind of transition.

Ryan Grant Little: 40:40

But what I like about it for the end user also, is that you know, like your enjoyment of a hamburger as an end user is not like it's the fact that a cow was, you know, grazed and went to a slaughterhouse, was slaughtered and then was chopped up into a burger is not intrinsic to your enjoyment of that end product, right, so we can replicate all of the things you care about with a hamburger, from you know how it cooks on a grill through to how it tastes.

Ryan Grant Little: 41:10

But without you know, and we can remove this, this super inefficient from a climate perspective. I mean, you know we're clean, cutting forests in the, in the Amazon, so that there's more room for cows to graze, to make hamburgers. Right, it's like it's the most inefficient process, basically in our daily lives. So so I'm super excited about the food industry, for for those reasons, you know I'm it helps also that I'm an animal lover and so I want to see the end of kind of the suffering that comes from factory farming. But, yeah, as purely from a financial perspective and from a climate perspective as well, I see tons of opportunity there. What about you, samuel?

Silas Mähner: 41:53

I have a follow up question I want to ask just about that. But to round out the point, I'm going to say something probably a lot less inspirational, a lot less relatable. I think I actually would love to see a lot more green hydrogen coverage, and the reason is that to me, what the point of coverage and venture is is to see an investment on those ideas that are high risk, high reward. It's a. Green hydrogen is an example. So I'll just kind of paint the picture a little bit.

Silas Mähner: 42:22

Green hydrogen is this technology that has massive upside if it works, but the issue is right now it's not an economically viable or, frankly, like a very, like a very safe process at scale.

Silas Mähner: 42:36

But that's the thing, which is that you know, if you look at the top three things that matter most about why not to do green hydrogen I read a report about this recently it's high cost the process to do it, high cost, high energy consumption to break apart the hydrogen and the oxygen, which is how you get the hydrogen fuel, and safety I mean just its combustibility.

Silas Mähner: 42:57

Each one of those things I would say, especially based on what we've seen, are areas where you can have a lot of innovation and the upside is this very clean, sustainable fuel that you can store.

Silas Mähner: 43:07

It's very easy to store hydrogen by very easy. I'm not saying this as an expert, just just for the audience, but you know, I think that's something that I would love to see a lot more coverage on, because it's the kind of things where I see the challenges being something that's very solvable in terms of large technology, like things you can invest technology into and money into, but the upside really gives you this energy source that solves a lot of our problems systematically In terms of how we get our energy. So I think that is an area that I would love to see more coverage, kind of flipping the angle instead of being from relatable to being something that people aren't thinking about, or at least maybe disconnected from, because it's not an EV charger, because it's not a grid optimization, because it's not a food item that you can relate to day to day. So something that's out of sight, out of mind, but I think should be in existence.

Ryan Grant Little: 43:56

And are you covering that? So, when you say more coverage, are people talking about this on your podcast as well? Do you have guests talking about this Been?

Silas Mähner: 44:04

a second. Well, this is a plug for any.

Somil Aggarwal: 44:06

Yeah, I think it is a plug for any We've had a couple in the past, but it's been a second since we've had any.

Silas Mähner: 44:10

yeah, Is it this a plug? For any listeners who are green hydrogen builders, please reach out. But no, I think that's something that it's come to light as a reason because of the new legislation released by the Biden administration. I won't quote the exact number, but it was a fairly large investment into green hydrogen, so I think that's put this topic back on the radar of many people, and so I think that's where, especially, I've been drawn to it again recently.

Ryan Grant Little: 44:40

Very cool. It's an area I don't know too much about. I mean I know the fundamentals of it but yeah, I mean I like to start at kind of some of the easier things and also just electrifying everything. I think is also a huge opportunity. But I wonder what your thoughts are on. Have you looked at kind of the math of replacing all of our kind of dirty electricity production with renewable energy and what the carbon footprint of that and what we need to use in terms of dirty energy to replace all of that Does that? Can we still hit even two degrees Celsius If we completely replace the grids in countries like the US with renewable energy? I wonder if you've come across any of this kind of math.

Somil Aggarwal: 45:37

I'm very bad at math in the first place, so definitely not my thing.

Somil Aggarwal: 45:42

But I will say one of my good LinkedIn posts had math in it, so maybe I should do that math more. But the point is I don't know. I think it's very difficult. There's probably some much more qualified people to answer that question. I haven't seen anything in particular around it, but what I did have somebody recently mentioned to me that I thought was interesting was the time value of carbon. You know it's much more Obviously it's better to reduce carbon now than later, because it's worse now, right. So if we can kind of it's more expensive, we can put more money into it now. That's the only thing I've heard on that topic, but I don't Again not an expert when it comes to the math stuff, so maybe someone else got an answer for us.

Ryan Grant Little: 46:22

So how many episodes have you guys done so far with the?

Somil Aggarwal: 46:24

podcast We've got released as of this recording, 132.

Ryan Grant Little: 46:29

Wow, okay, let me ask you so are you more bullish on solving the climate crisis now or before you started the podcast?

Somil Aggarwal: 46:43

I don't think it's changed much. To math. I'm extremely optimistic, generally speaking. I would say maybe more because there's a lot of people who seem to be figuring out the hard stuff right. So until I really feel that genuinely, until earlier this spring, nobody was talking about systematizing how to really build hardware startups, because we got to the point where we were able to do it with solar, right, there is a hardware thing and it worked partially because of subsidies in the beginning and then the costs came down and everything. But I don't think people really use it as a blueprint too much.

Somil Aggarwal: 47:25

And when we talked in Keyframe I think that was in April Keyframe were the first people that I heard of pairing this project financing and debt with venture funding, with equity funding. And then we fast forward to climate week and third sphere. We just that episode will be out by now with Sean did an amazing presentation on the they call it the escalator of impact, I believe right when they broke down all the different capital structures to use. So in that regard I'm more bullish because there's a really a large amount of sophistication going into it and people are willing to set aside. It's very clear they're willing to set aside some of the insecurities that I think traditional venture had.

Somil Aggarwal: 48:07

Because this is mostly something I learned from Sean, which is that he's like, hey, listen, vc guys created this language to keep the private equity people out of the room, so they had no idea what's going on. Right, and I think that combining the two together to basically take early stage tech and hardware space as quickly as possible to the point where it's like a divert, where the private equity can come in and make it funded easily, it's a high quality return. That should be the objective, right. It should not be the objective to go and raise more equity, right, you should just get it to a really high quality product and then you can scale it very quickly. So that's the thing I've learned and that's why I guess I would say, generally speaking, the shorter answer would be I'm slightly more bullish, but not necessarily substantially.

Silas Mähner: 48:56

I think for my perspective, I think also it's been a slightly shorter time for me being in this space, but even in that time, I think, more than being bullish or not bullish, it's really interesting to see the direction that climate tech is going and where people are putting attention. I think my personal thesis, which is related to finding the innovative financial model that'll support climate tech. I'm really inspired to see that that's becoming a very, very pertinent part of the conversation that people understand systematically. You have to incentivize it. People are also systematically being conscious of the industries that don't do what they're supposed to do. That's related to ESG, voluntary carbon markets, things like that.

Silas Mähner: 49:46

People are having active dialogue of hey, this doesn't work, even if it exists, people are being conscious about it. As far as how the industry is developed, I think we're in the right place in terms of understanding that we have to do something systematically. How long it's going to take to figure that out is, I think, very much dependent on whether we do it all correctly or not. Overall, probably a little bit more encouraged just because you do get to see how many people are thinking about this with a platform like this, but more than anything, it's more eye-opening, I think, slightly more optimistic, but also slightly more humble. How about yourself?

Ryan Grant Little: 50:25

It's complicated, I guess, but the simple answer is it's becoming abundantly clear to me that the technology exists. We could do this In so many ways. I think we're the problem. People are not designed to cooperate at this global level to make things happen. That's my biggest concern. I think we work well at the individual, family, tribe, society level, but for things like this that really need everyone on site at the same time, it still feels too much like somebody passes one law and another country says, okay, that's an opportunity for us to then exploit it in a different way. I don't know if I feel like we can get there where we need to be in time. Of course, this is the existential issue of our time, but that doesn't mean it's front-page news or top of mind and that type of thing. It's become more and more clear that it's not an issue of technology. It's an issue of people's foreign.

Somil Aggarwal: 51:46

I think that's really interesting to bring up. This is something we don't have time to talk about it in depth with policy, but I think something I usually critique policy-oriented people around is that you cannot force these things into being. You need to have some level of you don't need to, but ideally you have some level of incentive and then you pair that with people who genuinely understand people meaning founders who genuinely understand the need to build a product that is financially better for the users. It has a co-benefit. We had Capture Six on recently and they were talking about the main reason why they're being able to win is that they have the climate benefit is actually a co-benefit to solve something else that they would need to spend money on.

Somil Aggarwal: 52:32

You can get people to really, on a broad spectrum, think about it from that perspective. You then decentralize the need for everybody to work together. You can't get everybody to work together, To expect the whole world to work together, because the UN says jump or whatever is not going to happen, and if it did happen, it would actually cause a lot of people to be really concerned because they don't like that idea of someone world government type of thing. So you need to just create the incentives in a way, in my opinion, that gets entrepreneurs thinking how can we build this so that it's going to? The users don't actually necessarily care about the climate impact, but they care about the better technology.

Ryan Grant Little: 53:13

But fair. I mean that works in some cases. But I would be concerned about Things like carbon pricing or these problems of the commons. They requiredefinitely incentives is the way to do it. It's carrots and sticks, but it's about gettingyou have to really get countries around the world to find some kind of operating system. Tothat just allows the software to interact to make this happen. It's just a metaphor. But you can't have a price on carbon in half of the world and then not in the other half of the world and things will work. So there needs to be some kind of basic agreement on some of these things, and that's whatand it's possible that we get there.

Ryan Grant Little: 54:06

But you look at COP28 that's coming up in a couple of weeks and being chaired by the head of the oil and gas association for the country, and that's not a harbinger of good things to come. It's not signaling really well. But I want toSyad, as you mentioned, something about the founders with having these solutions. I think a big part of this also is about storytelling. So, yes, it's about having the betterI've seen a lot of really great solutions, and it's from engineers or from scientists, but they can't tell the story of it or why it matters, and they can't get people interested in it.

Ryan Grant Little: 54:46

A lot of times, and so a lot of times, I'll do these investment readiness workshops and people are expecting that it's going to be really heavy about financial modeling, and I spent a lot more time talking about storytelling than about financial modeling, because ultimately, that's what we need to do is we need to get our story straight about why this stuff matters and make it in different ways cool or appealing or enjoyable and move away from this narrative of deprivation. You have to give up this. You have to stop doing this. That doesn't work.

Ryan Grant Little: 55:24

And these kind of guilt narrative and instead focus on what is there to gain by nothing short of the survival of complex life on earth. It should be an easy story to tell. We need to look more to Lord of the Rings than to excel.

Somil Aggarwal: 55:39

Yeah, I mean, I really agree with this and I think we've talked about this before the show last week or whenever we had a catch-up, and where I come from, people don't believe that climate change is an issue because they're like well, it doesn't. You know, solar it's only works because it subsidize all this stuff. They're talking about data from 20 years ago. That's no longer true and there's nobody willing to give them the time of day. I've talked to many people and this was actually even two years ago were like oh you know, I don't bother talking to climate deniers anymore. I'm not going to try to convince them, but the point is there's a lot of people who just need to understand why I had no interest in working in renewables or climate prior to, kind of accidentally, getting the opportunity to work in it and moving to New York. That was the real reason I wanted to move out of Wisconsin, and as soon as I saw the technology and I realized that you can make a product that is financially more viable for the end user and the product itself is oftentimes stronger or better or whatnot, and it has a green positive, then there's literally no argument to it. Everybody should be open to doing it because there is nothing against it. It's a triple win situation and I agree with you.

Somil Aggarwal: 56:46

I think that a lot of people just do not know how to tell the story. It's the best. Guests on the show usually are putting it in terms of, like kitchen table terms. Right, how do you explain this to your grandma? Exactly, yeah, Cool, Well, I think we're out of time. What else do we want to go over? Anything else?

Ryan Grant Little: 57:02

Yeah we are. Yeah, that went by fast.

Somil Aggarwal: 57:09

Speaking of not having enough to talk about man, we've got plenty to talk about.

Ryan Grant Little: 57:13

Maybe I should do our episodes, Anything else.

Somil Aggarwal: 57:17

Selma on your side.

Silas Mähner: 57:18

Well, great. Well, look, ryan, we really really appreciate this. Most importantly, I think we turned ourselves into climate professionals halfway through, but we are, of course, first and foremost podcasters, so it was great to collaborate and work on this together For our audience. Before we sign out, where can people find you? Where's the best way to find your podcast? Give us your call to action.

Ryan Grant Little: 57:41

The best place to find me is on LinkedIn Ryan Grant Little and the podcast is climatetechpodcom. And back to you. Where should my audience find you?

Somil Aggarwal: 57:53

Also LinkedIn. That's the best place. I'm the most active at Silas Maynard. You have to put that in the show notes because I'm not going to spell it and the podcast is Clean Techies.

Silas Mähner: 58:06

For mine, my LinkedIn, it's Somal Agrawal, just my name, so I'm not going to spell it, so you can include that. That'd be good. And yeah, I believe I have an email on there as well, so if you want to reach out, please go ahead, and always love to see more people joining our community and furthering this mission.

Ryan Grant Little: 58:23

And hey, you guys reached out to me, so I just want to say thanks for doing that. This was a really cool idea. It's fun to be interviewed and also to interview another I won't say another climate tech podcast, because you know what I mean.

Somil Aggarwal: 58:37

Yeah, it's a good name. It's a lot of fun. Now, this has been a pleasure. We probably have to do this again, though, because we definitely could have more coverage, more things to talk about. So, anyways, pleasure having you on man.

Ryan Grant Little: 58:49

Thanks a lot, guys. Likewise, thanks for listening to another climate tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.