AI's Role & Impact in Driving Climate Tech Efficiency

Dunya Jovanovic: Could you share a bit about your background and how you became involved in climate tech?

Raj Kapoor: My journey started in mechanical engineering and robotics at Carnegie Mellon, where I worked on early AI projects like driverless cars. This sparked my passion for technology, but I soon shifted to entrepreneurship after starting a few student businesses. At a telecom company in 1992, I chose to explore a new field called information services, which led me into the emerging internet era. This experience, combined with my time in business school where I started an internet club, opened doors to Silicon Valley. I then joined a startup called At Home, which provided broadband services and taught me valuable lessons in both technology and people skills. Following my time at At Home, I co-founded Snapfish, an online photo service. The journey with Snapfish was a rollercoaster; we had to sell the company for 10 cents on the dollar at one point, but eventually, we bought it back, turned it around, and successfully sold it to Hewlett-Packard. After that, I became a venture capitalist (VC) at Mayfield, where I focused on marketplaces, consumer ventures, and some enterprise technology. My Silicon Valley network grew significantly during this time.

In 2006, I attended the TED conference, where Al Gore spoke about climate change, describing it as the most existential crisis humanity has ever faced. His message deeply resonated with me, and I realized I wanted to work on something that benefitted humanity. This led me to focus on climate change as a side project while continuing my VC work.

I came up with an idea for a simulation game that depicted the world’s habitat deteriorating unless players took action to reduce emissions. Although the game didn't achieve the impact I hoped for, it made me consider investing in climate tech instead. At Mayfield, we decided to go deeper into climate tech, focusing on energy disruption, software, and efficiency in the energy transition. I found a small transportation company called Zimride, which later pivoted into Lyft. I joined Lyft as the Chief Strategy Officer, focusing on electric, self-driving shared future. The pandemic presented challenges, and eventually, I decided to return to VC, inspired by a friend. We founded Climactic, a $65 million software-focused fund aimed at helping enterprises achieve net zero.

DJ: How does Climatic’s strategy differ from other climate tech-focused venture firms?

RK: When we started, there were only a few climate tech funds, and the ecosystem was still young. Now, with over 200 funds and billions flowing into the space, people often ask, "What sets you apart?" Our focus is on seed-level investing, and both my partner and I bring the experience of being founders who've started and sold companies. This hands-on experience is crucial, especially in the early stages. Our investment approach is also different. We target software companies that help businesses achieve net zero, with a strong focus on efficiency tech. Efficiency not only reduces emissions but also cuts costs, which is crucial in the current political climate where carbon reduction alone might face hurdles. We place a significant emphasis on improving supply chains, as they account for a large portion of a company’s emissions. By making supply chains more efficient, we can have a major impact.

DJ: Given your work with early-stage ventures and your deep involvement in climate tech, what marketing challenges do you see these companies typically facing, and what advice would you give them to overcome these challenges?

RK: One of the main challenges is that many founders in climate tech come from technical backgrounds and are driven by passion and mission. They often lack an appreciation for marketing, which can be a critical gap. Marketing is essential for defining the ideal customer profile (ICP) because, without this clarity, you could waste a lot of time selling to the wrong customers. Founders often jump straight into sales without first building a solid marketing foundation. However, effective sales are built on a strong marketing base—understanding your market, setting the right pricing, and ensuring that the customer perceives value in what you're offering. 

Another challenge is that as these companies grow and start hiring sales teams, they realize the need for tools, scripts, and brand awareness. Building trust with customers involves more than just selling; it requires a well-defined brand image and the creation of content that customers respect. I recommend that early-stage founders find a great marketing advisor—someone who has experienced both successes and failures in the field. This advisor can help in interviewing potential hires and shaping the marketing strategy, especially if the founder lacks marketing experience.

DJ: With the rapid evolution of the market and AI becoming a game-changer across sectors, how do you see AI impacting the fight against climate change?

RK: AI has immense potential in the fight against climate change, particularly in driving efficiency. The first step in achieving efficiency is understanding where inefficiencies exist, and that’s where data comes in. AI excels at processing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and making predictions that were previously difficult or impossible to discern.

For example, in the context of weather forecasting for supply chain management, AI can analyze numerous factors and predict outcomes far more accurately than traditional methods. This can lead to better investment decisions in sectors like agriculture, where companies need to consider climate risk when planning long-term contracts.

AI also has applications in predictive maintenance, making machines and operations more efficient. And in sales and marketing, generative AI can accelerate processes by analyzing customer interactions and creating more effective communication strategies.

However, there are challenges, such as the energy consumption of AI itself. The growth of AI, particularly in large language models, is leading to significant energy use, and we’re just beginning to see the implications. The industry needs to focus on making AI models more efficient and ensuring that the energy used comes from renewable sources.

DJ: Where do you see challenges for climate tech companies in adopting AI?

RK: There are two main challenges. The first is the understanding gap. Many companies lack the knowledge to effectively adopt AI, whether for internal processes like engineering or finance, or for addressing specific climate problems. AI is still cutting-edge, and understanding how to utilize the latest models and techniques, like prompt engineering, can be daunting.

The second challenge is the energy use associated with AI. Data centers are consuming increasing amounts of energy, and as AI adoption grows, so will its energy footprint. The question is whether the efficiency gains from AI can outpace its energy consumption. This will require innovations at multiple levels—from more efficient data centers to better chip designs and more efficient AI models.

DJ: What advice would you give to climate tech companies that want to incorporate AI-driven solutions in an environmentally responsible way?

RK: Ideally, companies should calculate the net reduction of environmental impact from their AI-driven solutions. For example, if a climate tech company uses AI for precision irrigation, the water savings and reduced crop destruction should outweigh the energy used by the AI. However, this is easier said than done, as these calculations aren’t always straightforward. My advice is not to stall innovation in AI for efficiency improvements, even if it uses more energy. Instead, continue pushing forward while also putting pressure on the AI industry to reduce its footprint. Since AI is concentrated in a few major companies, it’s a more manageable problem to address.

DJ: When it comes to innovations in AI or climate tech, what excites you the most?

RK: I’m particularly excited about using AI to advance energy storage. While we’ve made great strides in renewable energy generation—solar, wind, and potentially nuclear and fusion—the challenge lies in intermittency and reliability, especially for solar and wind. This necessitates the use of batteries, both on a large scale and at the edge, like in electric appliances.

The cost of batteries has decreased, and AI is making them more efficient. With energy markets becoming more dynamic, especially in places like California and Texas, the return on investment for batteries is improving. I envision every battery eventually becoming an AI trader of energy, optimizing its use in real-time, which is a thrilling prospect.

DJ: What advice would you give to someone new to the climate tech space who wants to start their own company?

RK: I would emphasize the importance of not getting too fixated on the idea of immediate success. Venture capital, especially in the climate tech space, takes time to yield results. It might be 10 years before you know if your efforts have truly paid off. My philosophy is not to focus too much on the outcome because, in reality, you can't control every aspect of the journey. What you can control is your reaction to the challenges and opportunities that arise along the way.

For those feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the climate crisis, or who doubt whether their contributions can make a difference, it's important to remember that your intentions and actions are what matter most. You don't need to solve the world's problems single-handedly. The best you can do is make a positive impact with the resources and knowledge you have.

In practical terms, I'd suggest immersing yourself in the industry. A great resource for learning more about climate tech is climatedraft.org. It offers educational content on the various sectors within climate tech and connects people to job opportunities in the space.

Timing is also crucial. The next few years are critical for early-stage companies to make a real impact on achieving net zero by 2050. If you're passionate about climate tech and innovation, now is the time to get involved, set your intentions, and take action.

 Hello, Raj, and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Thank you. For those who don't know you already, can you tell us a bit more about yourself and tell us how you got involved into climate tech? My professional path has been started out in the engineering world, and I was a mechanical engineer, did robotics at Carnegie Mellon.

This was back before. AI was a big thing, but we were trying to do driverless cars and driverless robots to go through pipes and all sorts of things. And so I got hooked on technology early on, but then I took a detour because I started a few student businesses and fell in love with entrepreneurship.

And rather than working at some boring chemical companies or other things, I went to a telecom company and there they gave me an option. And they said, you can do. Capital planning or this thing called information services. I didn't know what information services was. This is 1992, but I did know that capital planning was boring.

So I chose information services and it ended up being networked multimedia, which later turned into the beginning of the internet. And so I was excited and honored to be. At that beginning stage, I went to business school and there started a club is one thing I learned, which is that if you club around the Internet, which didn't exist.

And so if something doesn't exist, you start a club at a school and you say, I'm the president and everyone thinks you know what you're talking about. And so that was fun. I did that. Got a few job opportunities in Silicon Valley. I knew I wanted to be out in Silicon Valley. That's where tech and entrepreneurship really meet, especially back then.

I think it's worldwide now. And then I joined a little startup that was doing broadband services over cable modem called at home. And it was it was funded by good backers. Did that for a couple years. Really learned a lot, learned also people skills because I remember being denied a promotion where people said, wow, you are smart, but you may not be as liked as you think.

And so I had to really learn about what is it like to bring people in and really make a connection versus just saying the smart thing. I started a few companies then started one called Snapfish right after that my period at home. It was, online photo service. That was a rollercoaster ride.

We had to sell the company for 10 cents on the dollar that I had to give back to friends and family and investors, but then bought it back. And we turned it around and the market timing was better for what it was doing, which was around digital photography. And then we were able to sell it successfully to Hewlett Packard.

And at that point I became a VC. And I joined Mayfield, who had backed Snapfish but lost money, so I was surprised that they made me a job offer. And did that for seven years, made 14 investments. I really was a student of marketplaces, consumer, a little bit of enterprise, and learned a lot. And really got my Silicon Valley network much bigger because when you're an entrepreneur, you're really focused and it's harder to build a big network.

And there, what happened is in 2006, 2007 I went to TED. TED is this conference and Al Gore spoke, he was the former vice president of the U. S. And John Doerr, who was a, Partner at Kleiner Perkins and Kleiner Perkins is one of the most prestigious venture firms that's who I met when I came out and said I was the president of the internet club at Harvard in business school and That's where I got the job from at home.

So seeing him up there was inspiring and he was crying next to his daughter And saying that we are facing the most existential crisis we've ever faced, which is climate. Lots of challenges in this world are reversible. You can change them. This one is not reversible. And it impacts every single human being in the world.

So it really hit me that I've always wanted to work on something on the side of, that was benefiting humanity. I thought capitalism and that have to be different. And I it hit me that this is what I should be working on. This should be my pet project outside of being a VC. So somehow I came up with an idea, which I shared at Ted around creating a simulation game, which showed the habitat of the world getting worse.

Little critters, little animals with beautiful eyes that were getting sick and dying unless you did something. And the way the game worked was that you would take photos with, at the time there wasn't an iPhone, it was a camera phone. This was like 2010, 2011. And of you doing actions that reduce emissions.

So it could be walking, recycling, whatever it is, to build awareness. The game was really cool, got a half a million from the EPA, but it didn't really work. People didn't take actions. And so I scratched my head and said, Maybe I should. Go to investing in this thing rather than creating games.

And I with a few other people at Mayfield, I was there as a venture firm and we decided to go deeper into climate and look at time. It about energy and how do we disrupt the energy system? And we didn't have a fund to put hundreds of millions of dollars into companies. So we thought, let's look at software, let's look at the VAT, the supply chain going into the energy transition.

And and what are the other ways we can make things more efficient? And I looked at transportation, my partners looked at solar, we did solar city. I ended up finding this little transportation company trying to make right. efficient with a ride board, like a job board. It was called Zimride. I led the Series A and it turned out that we pivoted into Lyft and it was an amazing journey being a part of that.

In fact, so much that I left Mayfield because I want to be an entrepreneur again. I took a little detour into fitness started a company, which is now part of Class Pass My Body. And but then after that I realized, wow, the climate situation is worse. And it's beyond awareness. We need to go into action.

And so I had some ideas around what I could do in climate. And I went to meet with John and Logan, the founders of Lyft. And they said, forget all those ideas, come join us. And I joined them from being an investor to being the chief strategy officer. My job was to move us to an electric self driving shared future.

So that's what the future of Lyft and Uber is. And I did that for four years. The pandemic hit was challenging, even though we were able to hire hundreds of engineers to create self driving cars, we were creating electrification plans, but we had to pause everything because of the pandemic. And at that point, I said, look, I think we should be pausing this indefinitely right now and really focus on profitability given the pandemic.

And I want to go off and I got inspired by a good friend of mine, Josh Felser to work in climate again, back as a VC because now it wasn't about clean tech. It was about climate tech. Every industry needs to be decarbonized. And so we formed a thesis. We made some investments out of our own money, and then we raised Climactic, which is a 65 million software focused fund really around enterprises and how can we help those 8, 400 businesses go to net zero.

And how is climatic strategy different from other climate tech focused venture firms?

Yeah, there's, when we started this, there was hardly any, and the investors would tell us back in 2020 this is interesting. But, there's, is it really going to happen? Is there a lot of demand for it? Who else is doing this? And then fast forward to now, and there's 200 plus climate tech funds.

There's, tens of billions of dollars going into the ecosystem. And there's, and now the question we got, towards the tail end of raising our first fund was, how are you different? Because there's so many of you. So it's a good question to ask the way we're different is that a couple things.

First of all, we focus on seed level investing and we're founders. My partner and I both have started and sold two successful companies each, and we've been through really difficult times and being a founder along the journey as well as an investor. Is an advantage, especially at the early stages. And that's a big reason why we partner.

Secondly, is that our thesis is different. So we're not doing as much deep tech. We're not as focused around consumer. We're really focused around software companies that help businesses go to net zero. And in this first fund, it's really focused around efficiency tech. How do we help companies gain efficiency?

The carbon markets are up in the air, and there's not a lot of trust in them, and just reducing carbon for the sake of it is a challenge. And it may even be more challenging after this election in the United States. But what really matters is when, if you could reduce cost, And reduce emissions, which is what efficiency does, companies will make the investment.

We're seeking startups that help companies do that. And one of the ways that they really focus on is the supply chain. Supply chain is responsible for the vast majority of emissions in a company. So we focus a lot of our efforts around finding companies to help. Supply chains get more efficient. And since we here at New Perspective Marketing we work with a lot of climate tech companies and we know how big the role of the marketing is when we talk about the growth of the climate tech company and considering your work with early stage ventures what do you think, which kind of marketing challenges do they typically encounter and what advice would you give them to overcome those challenges?

So it's interesting because first of all, when you look at, The founders that are getting involved in climate tech, typically they're out of passion and mission. Typically, they have a technical background and they're less about understanding marketing. So first and foremost is really building an appreciation towards it.

And when we're dealing with the enterprise, people can sometimes jump to sales. And the first thing they'll do is usually founder sales of Trying to sell to the customer and what they realize is that selling the basis and the foundation of it is actually marketing, which is What is my ICP ideal customer profile because you could waste a lot of time selling to a customer that doesn't really care about it So finding that niche that's really The go to market is important.

How do you think about pricing the cut to the customer? And is it durable? If you price too much later on competition, if you price it too low, you're leaving value on the table. And they may not even value it that much because it's, if it's not that expensive, they think there's less value. So there's a lot around pricing.

And then there's the, when you start doing sales and you hire a sales team, they realize they need tools. They need scripts. They need answers. They need awareness support. How do you build the brand? And then the customer needs to trust, and part of the trust is what's the brand image of the company?

What's their position? Do people talk about them? Do they create content that people respect? And so marketing is enveloping a lot of that. It typically comes, in my opinion, there's product creation, and There's evangelical sales, and then they say, uhoh, we need to do some marketing. And it's a challenging one because it's, it can be more of an art than a science, even though if it's direct marketing for consumer, that's a little easier.

But for enterprises, it's a little bit more of an art. It's hard to measure. So it's hard to know what, whether the person they hired is working and if the founder doesn't have experience. In marketing it's hard to find who is an a player that they should be hiring So one of the things I recommend that they do is find a great advisor That is that you respect in marketing that has done successes and done failures and then have them help you interview since you may not know how to hire that person, but it usually comes After there's some semblance of product and some semblance of product market fit, or if there's no product market fit, they really need to invest in it to figure out what is product market fit.

You've mentioned how quickly the sole market is evolving. And now we have AI becoming a game changer across many sectors. So how do you see AI impacting the fight against climate change? AI is  When I say about efficiency, usually what you need to do with efficiency is to first of all understand where you are inefficient.

And that is done usually through data. Data could be coming from sensors, data could be coming from your supply chain, data could be coming from your finance department. Whatever it is, there's data. What's happened prior to AI is that we've created a lot of data. We've analyzed only some of it because it's hard to understand, and sometimes it's actionable, sometimes it isn't, and it felt like a one time scenario.

It's a lot of effort. You need to hire a lot of data scientists, et cetera. So this is less about generative AI, which we can talk about, which is exciting, but more about just the concept of what AI brings is the ability to take in a massive amount of data points and not fully understand how they're all correlated.

So like weather is a great example. There's so many factors going into weather. For a supply chain, as an example, and to utilize the latest models around neural networks that can infer patterns and make predictions far better than we've ever done before. And then you can continuously monitor whatever you're doing to continually make those predictions so it can help you make the right investment decisions.

So we have a company called Climate. ai as an example, and they help the food ag business that maybe thinking about investing in a five year contract in potatoes in Idaho, in particular areas of Idaho, and they can do better forecasting of weather and climate risk using a I using some of the prediction models that I used to do when I was doing self driving cars to help understand what are the likely weather patterns and where should they not invest?

And where should they invest? Maybe there's a whole different region of the country that they should be investing in five years. Or maybe they should stay away from certain areas and doing it. So that's just one example that's there. There's also around whatever you've invested in could be machines.

What have you, making that more efficient through predictive maintenance is another example. Then, of course, the running of the company. So this is where generative AI gets really interesting, which is, okay, you're in, you're selling solar, and you're trying to convince residences or commer or businesses to convert to solar, which we really need to do.

It's one of the most successful forms of new energy, and the math is working now. But there's a lot of barriers there around cost and understanding. If you could, as a company, let's say a large company like a solar city that we invested a long time ago, which is now part of Tesla go and get their thousands of sales reps, which they used to have.

Now it's mostly automated and look at their call logs and understand the objections they're getting. And then use generative AI to create the most powerful salesperson who knows who has all that information is able to assimilate what is going to work best. That's going to be better than anyone, any salesperson that you have, just like we're finding that AI doctors can diagnose better in many cases than a human doctor.

So I think we can accelerate sales. We can accelerate marketing. Because we can understand and have that loop of engagement much faster because of generative AI and creating words, creating images, creating videos, all of that's there. I would say there's just a ton of opportunity and especially around creating efficiency and we're just starting to scratch it.

We created a market map of climate AI companies and when we did this about a year and a half ago, there were less than 100, now there's over 200. And we'll be revealing the update of that in September. We had Climate AI here as guests on our podcast. I'm definitely going to link that episode here for this one so that people can get more introduced to what they're doing.

But where do you see challenges with climate tech companies adopting AI? So I think there's two layers of challenges. First of all, for the average company to adopt AI, there's a big understanding gap. So they could be adopting AI for a lot of things internally and for engineering development.

You don't need as many developers. There's co piloting to make your existing engineers more efficient. There's legal services so that you can save a ton on legal and just bring in the lawyer at the kind of last mile. There's finance about automating a lot of what you're doing on the finance side.

Just the knowledge base, I think, is challenging. If you're targeting a particular climate problem and using AI for it, there's also an expertise issue, which is that to understand how the latest transformer models work, to utilize the largest LLMs, to understand efficient prompt engineering and nested prompts and creating agents, it's so new and cutting edge that a lot of people don't have familiarity.

But I've seen this before in mobile. When mobile came Web engineers have to learn mobile, and this may be a little harder, a little different, but the principles are similar. And you will see a lot of engineers, software engineers, convert into AI engineers over time, but this gap that we're in now is more challenging because you do need enough people to seed and to help teach others.

So education is going to be really important early on. That's one layer. The second challenge is really the AI industry and its energy use, which is massive. So our belief is that data centers over the next two years are going to account for about 6 percent of the US's total energy consumption, which is quite a bit.

And large model training runs. And so there's training and inference in AI. Training is You're gathering lots of data and you're training a model of teaching it what's right and what's wrong. Inference is, there's a trained model and now you're actually deploying it. So you're asking it, prompt in chat GPT, it's using a model, using inference.

And the challenge is that the bulk of the energy use is going to come from inference. A lot has been training because we've just been creating massive models with 175 billion parameters. I think. GPT 4 has 1. 7 trillion parameters and so that training has taken it, but we are not even close to the peak that we're going to hit on inference.

And the way that a lot of AI works right now with large language models is that just to do simple calculations, like 3 plus 5. It goes out and analyzes the entire web and comes up with what it infers as the answer Where you can actually do it more efficiently by having using calculation and so we're going to see More efficiency on the models.

It's going to be important around Lowering the energy use but the other piece of it. It depends highly where it's done So if there's a significant energy consumption if for example, I think it was There's an example that was given recently. GPT 4 was trained in the Azure cloud region, Microsoft Azure, Canada East.

recently, because of the renewable energy that came out of that region at that particular time, the carbon footprint would about 13 X smaller than what it was training in another region. So being able to figure out which regions you go. But if everyone's trying to use that region, then you run out of renewable energy, too.

And so you have to solve that. So we have to solve problems on all layers of the stack. Put data centers closer to generation increase renewable generation. You're seeing Microsoft that did deal with a fusion company for future use of fusion for their data centers. There's also making the chips more efficient and that's happening.

So like new versions every two years or like 30 plus percent more efficient than the last version in terms of energy consumption, making the model architecture more efficient. So there's a lot that we could do. The question is, can That efficiency that we're going, that we're gaining outpace the growth of AI and the use.

And that's a big, interesting question that we're going to be facing over the next four or five years. Yeah. I have to say, we talked about this issue in our podcast, a couple of times with multiple guests. And my question for you is what advice would you give to climate tech companies to keep in mind?

When they want to incorporate AI driven solutions that are both effective and environmentally responsible into their tech well.

There is the ideal scenario is that there's some net reduction calculation that what this company's working on in terms of creating, let's say, a climate tech company has created a new way to bring efficiency into agriculture using precision irrigation as an example. And they're utilizing AI models to predict where to put more water and where to put less water and to save water as a result.

There's going to be some savings of water. There's going to be some reduction of crop destruction. All of the societal benefits, whether it's emissions or water reduction, in an ideal scenario, you compare that to, okay, the input is energy use. And to create those models and to maintain it. Does that come out positive?

Now that is easier said than done because they it's not always quantifiable. So at this moment in time, I think what we need to do is all flowers need to bloom. We need to not stall the innovation around AI for efficiency to reduce industry's carbon footprint. And if it uses AI, you've got to continue on it and then also put pressure on the AI industry, the data centers, all of the associated companies, the chips to continually move their their footprint down.

And the fact that a lot of AI is being clustered in a few companies in terms of the large scale models. Is actually beneficial because it's a little easier problem to go after of a few companies that are there. Yeah. It's not just, I just have to mention, it's not just emissions. It's water usage for cooling of this, of the AI centers, things like that, that we have to consider as well.

When we talk about sustainability of AI, that was something that we often hear here on our podcast. But when we talk about innovations. AI or overall in climate tech. What are you most excited about? So I would say I'm really excited about utilizing AI to make energy storage happen. So renewables are happening, solar, wind, Even nuclear, longer term maybe fusion, I'm really hopeful, but it's still longer term.

And so we have, yeah, we're all hopeful. We've got great energy energy creation. The issue is the intermittency and reliability of a lot of these, especially around solar and wind. And so it necessitates the need of batteries. putting whether it's large scale batteries or putting batteries closer to the edge, for example, putting a battery in a electric appliance so that it can have a more efficient use of electricity at peak times.

All of those things are starting to happen now. And frankly, a couple years ago, it wasn't cost effective because the cost of batteries was too high and there wasn't enough intelligence. to make those batteries efficient and to make whatever the end use is efficient. We're now seeing a lot of innovation at large scale batteries, mid scale, small scale and networks that are being created to create efficiency.

And we're seeing that the energy industry is starting to price in real time. Not everywhere, but like especially around California, Texas, the UK, Australia the energy markets are coming to life, which makes a battery ROI potentially 30 percent or more effective because now not only is it for outages and for lowering your everyday use, but you can tap into it real time and it almost becomes every battery needs to be an AI trader of energy.

And so we think that opportunity is super exciting. And what advice would you give to someone who is new to this clean tech space, clean tech, climate tech space, since you are in it for quite some time and you were really, you are really successful in it. So if someone wants to, start their own company within the climate tech space, what would you tell them?

Yeah first of all, I don't know if I'm really successful. We've started climactic and we're very early and. I didn't know I was a good venture capitalist until 10 years after being in venture. So that's the challenge of venture capital is that it takes a while to know whether you're successful.

And to me, I have a philosophy that I have is to not think about success as much. Maybe it's easier said because I've had some sexes, but I've also had some failures too. And it's about the if you're tied to the outcome, the challenge is you can't control a lot of the outcome. The truth is you can't control anything.

Accept your reaction to the outside world, whether it's you're in a relationship, whether you're starting a company, even your health, things are going to happen to you and what you can only control is your reaction to what happens. And sometimes people get really stressed out and say, I don't know if I can work in climate because what I'm doing may not work or it's just it's too stressful to think about where the world is going.

And I don't know if I, it's just too much. I think from my perspective there is what matters is the intention that you're putting forth and the results are not really up to you. There's the universe that's at work. And so if you're coming in with good intentions and you're making good action and good effort, that's all that can be asked of you as an individual.

And I think people have to keep that in mind and cut themselves a break and not feel like they have to solve the world's problems. I, whether or not the companies we're investing in, the entrepreneurs that I'm advising that I love advising are going to have a big difference in the world is not up to me.

All I can do is make the effort and feel a sense of satisfaction that I spent my time wisely. in doing that. So that's, I think my biggest advice for them. Of course, you can learn. There's a great resource called climate draft. org. If you're new to the space it has educational content on what is climate tech and climate tech is broader now than clean tech was about energy.

Climate tech is every industry. And we need to decarbonize everything. And so climate draft. org is a great resource. So there's ways to learn and then it also connects you to jobs that are available in there. I do believe, though, that the timing is now to make that intention, to make that action. If you are interested in the early stage of technology, if that's an interest area of a reader or of a listener we have about five years for these early stage companies to make a difference towards the net zero goal of 2050.

There is no time better than the present to get involved. And to set intention and take action. Oh, thank you, Raj. I think this is a great place to end this conversation. Just one more question where people can reach out to you and find out more about Climatic and what you do there.

Sure. Best approach is our website, climactic. vc. We're also followable on LinkedIn, and we'll post content and our views on the world as well at that. And then finally, if you want to email, reach out raj at climactic dot vc r a j. Thanks Raj. This has been great, wonderful, great to talk to you too, and wishing you and the readers the best wishes and all the luck and all the happiness.