[ad_1]
“The climate is crazy. Even worse than it looks.” This emerges from the front page of a 12-page letter sent by venture capitalist Chris Sacca to potential investors at Lowercarbon Capital, the climate-focused company he launched last year after a brief retreat.
What’s up: Lowercarbon, which initially funded more than 50 startups with money from Sacca and his wife Crystal, announced last week that it had raised $ 800 million in outside capital.
- The $ 800 million is divided among four funds, two at an early stage and two at a later stage. Each strategy includes a small fund that contains a slice of existing companies in the Lowcarbon portfolio, so that the interests of LPs and GPs were more aligned (plus it was a marketing sweetener).
Why is this important: Institutional and individual investors overcame the PTSD ROI of the initial boom in green tech investments, with Sacca telling me the funds were more than 2 times oversubscribed in just a few days.
- “Carbon is an expensive and inefficient thing,” Sacca argues. “Anywhere we can take it out of the process, it’s cheaper. It means customers. We’re not running a non-profit organization here.”
- “A big difference between now and years ago is that current technology allows startups to reach the binary point of understanding much faster whether something is working or not. a few years to build something that you don’t really know if it’s going to spread. “
Big picture: There is still a relative dearth of early stage companies investing in green technologies, despite an emerging consensus that climate change is an existential threat and that it cannot be halted (let alone reversed) by the government. only policy change.
- Sacca thinks we’ll know money matches opportunity when we see more and more venture capitalists hiring climate scientists like Clea Kolster of Lowercarbon.
- “I see more traditional VCs who care and want to be proud of what they’re doing. But we still don’t see too much competition, as most of these companies are clustering around low-impact, consumer-oriented technologies like basic reuse and recycle technologies because they don’t yet have the skills to do so. more in-depth technology. “
Also: Lowercarbon had planned to offer fund allocations to historically black colleges and universities on a no-charge / no-carry basis. But that has yet to happen, as Sacca says, it has proven surprisingly difficult to find “decision makers” in schools that have traditionally not had access to the best venture capital funds.
- “Our goal now is to donate a few million from each fund to HBCUs, while also establishing direct relationships with schools so that they can secure similar deals with other large venture capital funds. Kind of an open invitation because we have some of those funds pending. Maybe this interview will help get the word out. “
The bottom line: If we are to innovate to emerge from the global climate catastrophe, venture capital must play a key role. Right now.
[ad_2]
Source link