Hello everybody. Pleasure to host you, David, here on stage today. We just met in person for the first time now, even though we were kind of at the same events. I have a funny story to begin with. Recently, I heard from the network, wow, there's this amazingly hot startup called Flow Engineering and they're really involved in building, connecting softwares in the whole hardware engineering space. It's a really ambitious project and I see your name as an angel investor. I tried to get in as well and they flat declined me and said, 'Nope, sorry. No chance.' The Stripe founders are involved and Sequoia's involved and you're involved and I got completely rejected. So here I am and I will ask you maybe if you can help me to get in in the next round.
Happy to try. I may have some paratha I can sell you.
That would be great. Yes, with a discount please.
I'm an early investor in the company with a discount.
So David, you were a very early investor there. Anyway, so I would like to start. You said recently it's kind of embarrassing how fun climate crisis is to work on. So I think it's in a way nice to see that this is not a doomsday talk here today but actually we're going to put a positive spin on it.
I can talk doomsday all along. You know, I'm actually really pessimistic. But that said, my background is founding a company, Unity, and I'm really proud of that and built that up and still on the board. But like 11 years ago, I stepped out of my operating role. I woke to Earth. I invested in a bunch of startups. I found some deep tech startups that were really exciting and they were all thinking climate sustainability. And I was like, I know what to do with these guys. From a teenager, I was worrying about the climate crisis. So I basically decided a few years ago I'd spend the rest of my career on climate. I built a venture fund on the theme but also as an angel and LP and also like nonprofits. I kind of do full stack climate. And there are some really really bad things happening. The good thing is it's really fun to work on. There's really smart people, good solutions that are competitive in the market. We get to invest in them. We think we'll make money on those. If that's enough to save civilization, I'm not sure.
Okay. And is there for you also like you love how there's so much potential, but it's that intersection to the impact as well. Is that a driving force for you in that space?
Yeah, I'm a little post capitalist in the sense that, you know, Unity built me some wealth. I could also like not work so much. But you know when I was a kid I was told like I think many of us that money is power and you know then I made some money and I was like where is this power? How can I like you know where's the levers to save the planet or do good things and I'm looking for these levers frankly that's what I spend most of my time on.
Nice. May I ask the audience how many of you are directly involved in the impact space or just here out of interest? So directly involved... 50%. Okay, that's nice. And many people coming out of interest. Great to see. Perhaps that's the capitalists, huh?
I like capitalists, too. I'm a capitalist in my kind of work time.
Yeah. So you were here in 2021. And at the time, of course, sustainability was the big buzzword. Massive hype around that. And now, unfortunately, because of Trump and wars and whatever else, you don't hear much about it anymore. What has changed in that sense from your point of view?
Yeah, so you're right. I mean if you go back to let's say pre-COVID or maybe slightly after, sort of the COVID peaks, if you ask people in the west what's the most important problem, I mean some majority would say climate right. And we started working on this before and have built a venture firm. We invested in 27 companies and it's going well. We're investing out of fund two now. Still fundraising if you have money, but we've raised quite a lot of the fund.
Okay, you want to share your email for any ticket interests?
But no, but what unfortunately happened is I mean Trump is one thing and sort of the stuff over there, but it's the war, right? And the war has triggered this kind of series of worries about wars and it's just very very hard for people to think about long-term potential problems when there's a short-term acute problem near them. So that's sad. The good thing is a lot of the climate solutions are now cheaper, better, they're downhilling, like power is getting cheaper because of, you know, more plentiful, let's say, because of renewables and so on. So that's kind of inevitable. And the companies are still being founded. People still see the problems. And yes, it's not as hot, but that's kind of to some level okay.
You say it's not as hot. The main way that has impacted the space, is it the talent is going more to the vibe coding and there's less exceptional talents involved or what is the difference then?
Less the... there's still company formation, talent is still going forward. You know, the good talent is kind of longer term thinking maybe so it's not you know only following what's on the front pages I think. Where there's a problem is with you know some policy, some of the feeling that we had before. I think all corporates had a feeling before that okay in a few years there'll be more regulation, it'll be more limited, I should really focus on my sustainable projects and that feeling is to some level gone. You know, we can't expect there to be more regulation in 5 years than there was you know now. I think it'll happen but people don't expect it. The good thing is there's enough kind of downhill projects where like they're just better cheaper faster, being bought by corporates that want you know better cheaper faster, that we can find enough like technologies, startups to you know push into big production.
Yeah. Okay. May I ask you for a recent example then of a startup that is really most exciting to you where you're involved in or not involved in, something you've seen.
Sure. I mean, let's just take a really simple example actually like electric bikes, right? Electric bikes are great. They're like, you know, small battery. They get you really far. You don't break a sweat. You can kind of use them as a vehicle. Way better than gas powered cars and electric cars for many things, not for everything. The growth of electric bikes is, you know, just it's going to... it's already like went from nothing to a few billion. It's going to go to like 100 billion and beyond in total market, right? A lot of manufacturers, lot of different bikes. Now, these bikes become secondhand bikes kind of fast. They get sold and traded and we found a company that is like you know is placing themselves as the best kind of reseller, guarantor marketplace for ebikes. You know it's a company that we think you know went from like a few million dollars of sales to you know well over 100 and we think they'll go... there's no reason why they won't keep growing for like many many years from here on out in multiple markets now and so on. It's called Upway. Amazing company. We're very proud to be working with them.
Yeah. So, that's just one example of, you know, it's not deep tech as such, but there's a lot of kind of weird deep tech knowledge of the electronics, the batteries, because people like buying things with a new guarantee. So, you have to kind of understand what's in there, test them, make sure it's all good, safe, because batteries start burning if they like open up. So, a lot of wisdom in a company like that. It's kind of simple, but it's going to go far.
You mentioned deep tech. There's a lot of founders here in the audience as well. Can you give an example there and perhaps also a space which may be an inspiration to people here thinking about what can I build actually?
Yeah. So one of my favorite founders, James Dehome, he founded about six seven years ago a company using lasers and standing sound waves, ultrasound waves to look inside the brain and he built that into a medical device company really impressive called Coind. Along the way he had a realization that he could use these lasers and light sensors like light chips like CMOS chips to do calculations, matrix calculations and with a couple of like kind of enabling innovations he could basically build a computing device that is faster than an Nvidia chip. So he started building this company using 10% of the power and a company that can grow, you know, we see a path where they can become like not just a little bit faster but like much much faster than kind of silicon chips over the next 10 15 20 years. Another company, you know, is it climate? Yes, because you know data centers is the one thing that grows in power usage across the world. So if we can reduce the power consumption by 90% that's a huge deal. You know, guy came in with kind of a technical insight, built a team around it, raised a bit of money from you know good people and is now off to the races.
What stage, where is he at exactly, where is he at more precisely now?
Where is he at? He raised the A round this summer.
Okay. And the deployment at scale when do you think?
Over the next few years. There's a lot to build.
It's not too far away, huh?
No, no, no. There's a lot to build, but it's also they've made incredible headway. That's Flux computing.
May I ask how many founders or pre-founders are in the room? Okay. Wow, that's a lot. Cool. So, more than 50% there. Nice to see you all. Good luck with your endeavors. So, you're a Decacorn founder.
