Okay, so the best part of actually moderating a fireside chat with Chris is it's the only format where you're guaranteed to get a word in edgewise because I get to ask the questions at least. And Chris and I have known each other for 15 plus years at least when I was the chief operating officer at Twitter and Chris was an investor there. And that's actually where I want to start. I actually want to start at the end.
At least the end of Sacca 1.0, which was in 2017ish. You had invested in Twitter, you had invested in Uber, you invested in Instagram, you invested in Stripe, Docker, like a whole host of others. Lowercase Capital probably had the best returns of any venture fund. It was on the Mount Rushmore of funds. And then the thing you did next was you walked away. Why?
Yeah. Look, I wasn't feeling it. I think it's just that simple. In the beginning when you're trying to put something like that together, and I wasn't rich when I started Lowercase or anything like that. So I did it by necessity and I emailed every rich person I'd ever met. And I remember it was St. Patrick's Day. I went up and had a couple of beers at least. Came down and checked my email and it was amazing. Some people said yes. Some people never said yes or even replied. There's a lot of people who ghost you. Nothing's more harrowing than raising for your own fund and getting ghosted because when you raise for a product and someone says no, you can project it onto the product like oh they don't get the market, it's too early or they don't like my co-founder or whatever. But when you go to somebody and say hey I'd love for you to invest in my fund and they say no, they're saying directly to you like I don't believe you're going to give me back more money than I'm about to give you. And that's gutting. It's personal. But then some people shock you with their yes. I actually remember Marissa Mayer wrote back and was like, 'I'm in for like a wild amount of money.' And maybe it was like the beer muscles or whatever, but I wrote back and was like, 'Hey, that's amazing, but I didn't even think you liked me.' And she wrote back, 'Oh, I don't like you. I just really like arguing with you.' And every time we do, I learn something. So, but anyway, at the time I needed it to work and so I never had done the reflection on is this what I want to do. Part of that was because those earliest days came really easy. It was fun to be there for the earliest days of Y Combinator and the empowerment of the actual builder without the 62-page business plan and all the layers of VCs. People were actually throwing code at the wall and getting users to try stuff. And by the way back then YC demo day was actually live code, 10 companies, 3 days. You could spend a few months figuring out if you wanted to invest in them. There wasn't an app for it yet, it wasn't a meat market. But as time went on I started to realize that I only knew how to be good at this business if I was willing to put unlimited infinity time into it. And the next wave of startups that were coming along were just things that I just couldn't bring myself to care about. I just could not care about gaming. Like, you know, and it wasn't a knock on anybody else who was filling the Staples Center watching League of Legends or whatever. Like, I just couldn't give a shit. I couldn't give a shit about dating apps, you know? And I was in a different phase of social. I mean I remember kind of looking at Snapchat and it felt kind of obvious but also exhausting. And so the more I did that and then I was on TV for a while and there I saw like a lot of really fun cool entrepreneurs but I'm like but at the end of the day this is a fucking kitchen gadget, you know? And good gadget. You start to ask yourself 5%. No no it's amazing. I mean look, the queen of QVC, I learned a lot from her. But if you have the luxury of getting a chance to reflect and by then I did. You start to ask yourself like is this worth the tradeoff of time? You know I used to ask myself is this project why I want to tell my kid I can't hang out right now that I can't play, is this worth saying like hey I'm on the phone. It sounds so basic and yet that trade-off became less and less clear to me. And by the way, Shark Tank was like one of the great experiences. It's such a positive show. They didn't tell us what to say. It's like as authentic as reality show can be. But at the same time, if you go on The Bachelor and get married, everyone expects you to own that within like 60 days, right? If you do a deal, as all the GPs here know, that's like a 10 to 15 year commitment. So, I quit and that was wild. I mean, I know where I was. I wrote that blog post. I stayed up all night and I hit publish and the only two people who knew it was coming were me and my wife Crystal who's been my co-founder from the beginning. And it's weird because in the beginning you're convincing anyone you know to back you at all. And then when you become that bankable, nobody else gets it. And yet Crystal and I were the only two people in the world who knew what was on our scorecard, what would matter to us, the value that we were placing on fulfillment, fun, interest, impact over the money. And we could have put it on autopilot at that point, right? But I was glad to not spend a lot of time. I didn't really ask anyone else for advice on it. I just ripped the cord because I didn't want to be talked out of it. And it was great. It was scary. I didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of my life yet, but we started playing around and toying with the different ideas and the election had just happened and I was a little upset about that. And we were doing a lot of philanthropy, but along the way I rediscovered some of my roots in energy.
Yeah, talk about that. Talk about your roots in energy.
Well, at Google, I used to buy and build the data centers along with a team of folks. That was wild. For the first year I worked at Google, I was a secret employee. Drove around the world kind of doing billion-dollar power deals and buying a plant and pulling fiber. And once the Department of Homeland Security caught up with me and pulled my car over in Oregon and they were pretty convinced I was a terrorist because I was asking too many questions about wireless infrastructure. But yeah, that was my role and fast forward to today my life has come absolutely full circle. It's weird.
And when did you decide to wake up and be climate guy?
Well, that's the fucking thing. I actually resent that term.
I know you do. That's why I asked.
The climate people are responsible for your houses in the Palisades burning down. Climate people are the obstructionists. We can't guilt and shame our way out of the real crisis confronting the planet right now. And yet that's been their fucking obsession is to make anyone who is actually trying to build an abundant lifestyle feel bad about it. You know, it's funny, I said this out loud right after the fires. I said, 'Go talk to the Sierra Club about it. Go talk to Earthjustice.' And I really thought I would get crucified for it. And the reality was they didn't even stick up for themselves because they know how many years of NEPA lawsuits they filed to prevent fuel reduction that would have prevented the catastrophe of those fires. The people who are actually taking this seriously are the same people who have built the entire lifestyle that we enjoy today. You cannot actually build any lasting solution by shaming the oil and gas industry. Like raise your hand if you somehow got here today, have enjoyed where you're sitting, the clothes you're wearing, the food you ate without benefit of the oil and gas industry. Like we wouldn't. For real. You want to have that?
Yeah. Yeah. But I was just so excited to hear your vegan journey. But the reality is that's what built what we have now, right? For sure. And we can't ignore that and we can't shame it. And for years, the best jobs, if you went to engineering school and you were a builder, the best jobs in the world, the ones where you could provide for your family and put a picket fence up were in big energy, big ag, big automotive, big aero. Like that's where the jobs were, right? But the reality is the cost benefit curve has changed. And that's where we decided when our partner Clay Dumas joined us to co-found Lowercarbon because we started to realize that the cost curves of climate solutions had come so far down. But we don't even call them climate solutions. It's just the cost curves of providing energy, transportation, building materials, industrial chemicals, agriculture, like all of those systemic costs that come down because carbon itself is expensive. Turns out digging up and burning old dinosaur bones costs a lot of money. Things tend to blow up now and then too. And it also makes you completely dependent upon autocratic regimes, other autocratic regimes. Wink. And so the result is that anytime you can remove it from a process, it equals profit. And we've been blessed with all of this energy under the ground, but it's so fucking self-defeating to deny the energy that's coming from the sun.
So you build a team. First off, this is also different. You started as a lone wolf, kind of the ultimate solo venture capitalist. You now have built a team around you. How many people are at Lowercarbon?
And what kind of people are they?
Not climate people. No. They're capitalists. They're engineers. They're builders. They're scientists. You know, I think it's really important. They believe in abundance. And that we aren't going to sacrifice ourselves our way out of this. Like if you come to a Lowercarbon event, we'll have some vegetarian option on the menu, but there will also be a steak because steaks are fucking delicious. And so the people that we have work for us, they are just attracted to big intractable problems and they believe in markets. You know, as John Arnold said, markets work most of the time. Like we are big believers in markets and that's what's amazing. So we have a company making industrial chemicals using enzymes instead of petroleum as the inputs. A lot of their business is selling to the oil and gas industry. It's like implicitly decarbonizing what they do. But those guys don't ask what it's going to do for their scope 3 emissions. They don't give a shit. They just ask is it cheaper? Is it this chemical? And the question they've started asking the last couple years is like oh I can get it down the street. Doesn't come on a boat and I don't have to worry about it being held up for tariffs or god knows what international conflict it's caught in. Fuck it, I'll buy it.
So, let me investing in this category. Typically, there's like three cons. One, there's not a ton of capital traction. Two, there's not a ton of revenue traction. And three, policy props these companies up. You must have a thesis on why you're investing in these companies. Is that bullshit or is that real?
No, it's real. Because look, when Kleiner and Kla started their climate funds, the math was hard without regulatory capture. Yeah. You needed not only subsidy but permission to build a lot of this stuff because it was too expensive to build and because there was no price parity nobody was willing to actually buy the stuff right. And so you start these funds and then you hire Colin Powell and Al Gore to go bludgeon the world of PowerPoints I guess and hopefully try and find some way of making this work. What we started to see is stuff could actually just get there so that the user, the customer buys it out of sheer greed, out of sheer self-interest. And that's what started coming together and we did it first out of the family office and then we raised a couple billion dollars to go pursue it and it's working and with each month it works better and the numbers are there. And here's the funny little secret is when we all started Twitter you're like peering into a crystal ball and you're trying to divine like what is this thing going to be and is anyone ever going to give a shit about it and how can we convince them to use it. I mean we were in many late night discussions about what do you even put in the window about how was your day, what are you up to, like how do you even get people to use it, right? Everything we do right now is a substitute good for something. Every single thing we make, we already know exactly who the customer is, how they buy it, what they pay for it, the specs they need it to meet, the delivery conditions, how soon it needs to be there, the reliability, etc. We know all of that before we write our first check. It's not fair. Like we have more information. We do more, I never would have used the word underwriting in our old business, but we underwrite these things. I mean, our partner Kai Kelly, we call her Kai GPT, like she's maybe the smartest financial engineer I've ever seen in my life. And Jamie keeps calling to try and get her to come back. But Kai leads an underwriting process with more data and information than we had when we took Twitter public, man. And so it's not a fair, it's a rigged game at this point.
How about I want the audience to feel a little bit about some of the companies that you're investing in and what mind-blowing stuff they're doing. So, give me an example of an amazing company. Let's start with like data centers in space. You must be investing in data centers in space.
Fuck dude. No. Look, there's a lot of sun out there, it turns out. And there's sun even when the planet rotates the other way. It makes infinitely more sense to just bring that sun back down to the planet. And so, we do have some exposure to that. You can beam sun back down. It's safe. It's easy and then you can take care of all the other shit here that's not at 0 degrees Kelvin and they're pretty easy to build down here. So we make, I think one thing that's really exciting is data centers in the ocean. So we have a company called Panthalasa that builds these big, I don't know, we'll call them buoys, that they drift out to international waters and they bob up and down and they generate a lot of power and they've got compute clusters in them so they'll manage AI workloads out there. And when I say big, by the way, they're 100 yards long, man. 100 meters, actually. Sorry. Like, and they just bounce around. It's pretty cool. And they've got an internet connection and it's the cheapest power on the planet right now. And we've got insane stuff. We've got cloud seeding right now that's finally working at scale.
