How we learned and continue to learn about climate & tech

Team Coral's journey and reading list

One of the endlessly fascinating things about writing at the intersection of climate, technology, and startups is that there’s so much to explore and learn. We’ve gotten to meet technologists building beauty products out of kelp, running startup accelerators in Montreal, and networking into the US ecosystem from Argentina. All have enriched our thinking and have much to offer the world. 

There are times when it’s genuinely intimidating trying to bring sufficient depth and understanding to add value to those conversations. We’ve heard this sentiment echoed from job-seekers transitioning into climate tech, aspiring founders, and investors looking at the space, usually in the form of a question; “How do you learn enough, quickly enough, to be useful here?” 

In a slight break from our usual programming, let’s talk about our never-ending intellectual journey to understand the enormous complexities of climate change, how to use technology and innovation at precise points with leverage on the problem, and turning all of the above into viable startup companies. This was a fascinating one to write, as hindsight reveals that we started thinking about these subjects, both separately and together, a lot earlier than we realized. 

Note; We mention a number of newsletters and podcasts in this piece, have spent time with many of the authors behind those resources, and consider several of them to be personal friends. We have no financial affiliation with anyone mentioned here, nor are there any agreements in place to trade recommendations, followers, or any other such social-media silliness. We make our money elsewhere, in part to keep ourselves honest about these things. 

Our backgrounds

Both of us grew up as technologists and capitalists in the VC ecosystem. 

I (Chris) studied English, philosophy, business, and economics in school, and stumbled into a job in commercial real estate after college. While this was a short and mostly uninteresting stint (you haven’t lived until you’ve hand-coded a property budget into excel), it was instructive to see the colossal amounts of money devoted to the efficient operations of big buildings, to realize that none of that capital was devoted to understanding the energy lifecycle and environmental impact of the built environment, and just how little anyone seemed to care. After a grind of a year, I was recruited into a low-level sales role at a software-as-a-service startup, decided I liked making money, and spent the next decade making more of it while growing into progressively more senior roles in go-to-market leadership across a few startups. 

Nicole’s academic background is in chemical engineering, which in practical terms meant that she spent much of college studying too much, building lightweight but functional buggies for a racing club, and learning how to distill moonshine after hours in the lab. Whoops, probably shouldn’t have added that last part 🙂. After school, she parlayed the engineer’s talent for systems thinking and analysis into data and operational leadership roles at a couple of Seattle-area tech companies that you’ve probably heard of, before joining an IOT startup in late 2021. 

I’d been with the same company for about a year at that point, was running the sales organization, and became peeved at the annoyingly intelligent new girl who expected the GTM org to, like, do things properly. The feeling was decidedly mutual and we mostly hated each other, until we didn’t. Somewhere along the road to not-hatred (we’re married, if that wasn’t clear), we started talking at great length about the smallness and lack of ambition in what were considered the best early-stage startups, the fact that the technologists in our beloved PNW were mostly ignoring the fact that the sky turning orange from wildfire smoke is now an annual occurrence, and what a couple of smart and driven people could do about it. 

Coral was born from those conversations. She’s a brilliant scientist who could look at the climate companies in VC portfolios and find the development roadblocks and lack of second-order thinking that would make them a lot less effective at unfucking the planet than their glossy marketing materials would have any of us believe, while I’d spent many years learning everything about product-market fit, the use of investment capital as a resource, and crossing the chasm from POC to commercial viability and scale. It became clear that, while the science for a lot of these companies was very bad, their business models were actually worse. We started reading and writing as a way to figure out what the better way could actually look like. 

Lesson for builders; We talk to many of you who come from either science or business. Success in this space requires the very best of both. Find a thought partner with complimentary skills. We hope this is your cofounder, but at minimum a trusted advisor. Do this before you invest time and money into starting a company. If you need help finding your partner, just email us. We have a network and many of them are looking to build. 

Reading and Listening

The early episodes of the My Climate Journey podcast are terrific, and a model for technologists without a background in climate moving into the space. We are not fans of the current state of the podcast, nor in particular of the VC fund and monetized media business that’s grown around it; True curiosity and exploration have been replaced by a lot of book-talking and fluffy interviews of portfolio companies. Incentives come for us all. 

The Titans of Nuclear podcast is certainly about energy, but also public education, and the continuous pump-bullets-into-foot process of trying to build infrastructure in America. The host is a trained engineer, accomplished entrepreneur in robotics, and terrific communicator. 

Keep Cool, by OG Nick Van Odsol, is the first and most comprehensive collection of writings about the business of climate. We read it religiously. Nick also sent a few words of encouragement in the early days of Coral that gave one of the first signs that we might be onto something while building in this ecosystem. You should send him pictures of your gym on twitter (don’t ask).

We write a lot about the climate capital stack, and ways to break dependence on misaligned venture capital. Enduring Planet is a fantastic company building to help climate entrepreneurs do exactly that, and their insights are the best, heavily tactical resource we’ve found here. 

Last Week in Climate is Crunchbase for Climate, focused on Europe. We’ve written about a number of companies we first saw in their digests, and learned a ton about the nuances of building businesses across the pond. H/T to Tim Steppich and team.  

Volts, by David Roberts, is independent journalism about the energy transition. David’s a great writer, might be a better interviewer, and gets incredible guests. 

Climate Tech Canada, by Justin Reist, is a spiritual northern cousin to Coral. We think Canada has a great deal to offer the world as a center for climate innovation, and Justin has done more than anyone to make this a reality. 

Climate Draft is, unsurprisingly, focused on job seekers, and publishes a great weekly roundup of news and job listings. 

Last and not least, we can’t recommend enough that you go out and talk to anyone building and investing in the space. If you see a great company and want to know if they’re hiring, send the CEO a cold email with a few sentences on what you admire about their business, and ask if you can come help. If you want to learn more about something covered in a resonant article, drop the authors a note. We’ve had some of our most fun and educational conversations this way, and have found climate builders to be invariably gracious and helpful. 

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