Gustaf Alströmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned you have this list of areas you're excited about. I know we'll share in the show notes, but is there any you want to highlight, just like here's areas you're most excited about and want to fund and/or are there companies you want to mention that are super interesting and super cool in the space that people should know about? Gustaf Alströmer We wrote the list and we are highlighting companies in each of the categories. I don't know if I want to highlight any specific categories, but I can talk about some of the things that we've funded in the past that has real legs. So here's how I generally think about climate tech. So we have to decarbonize all the things we do that emits emissions. That means we have to change a bunch of things in the world, change transportation, change energy, change homes, all of these things, or change how we heat homes for example. And then there is carbon removal. Carbon removal is sort of like, well even if we do all of this stuff really well, it's probably not going to be enough. And because there's an opportunity and there's some evidence to suggests that we can actually remove carbon from atmosphere in some way or another, a lot of companies are also working on this at the same time. I would say we need to do both and they're not in conflict. We probably are going to need to do both. Well, we certainly need to do the first one. On the decarbonization side, there's infinite number of categories of our society where we met a lot of carbon, right? So I'll give you an example. Shipping is a really big deal. A lot of carbon emissions come from freight ships around the world. That's not obvious solution how you would solve that because the kind of oil that they run on is really cheap and it's a very low margin business and they don't have a whole lot of incentives to change besides what is coming down regulatory. So it's not a national solution where someone to be a cool, someone will build a test off ships and it just work out. But the two companies to be funded in that area, one of them is Seabound who is building carbon capture and removal for ships. The other one is Fleetzero who build electrical ships. Electrification is on and again and again and again and again and whenever it's being applied, turn out to be a more efficient way of doing whatever thing that you were previous doing with the combustion industry. It is almost no maintenance. It's cheaper to build. The batteries are more expensive, it's cleaner and it fits the carbon coal you have. There's just a bunch of benefits there, but there has limitations. Usually the limitations on electrification has to do with batteries. It's like how far can you go? Now that category is what I call the... Which is a very important kind of critical one, which is the carbon accounting and sort of the recommendation systems that help big company account for the carbon that they have and they are giving some recommendations of what you do. So I'll give you three examples. We funded Unravel Carbon, which is carbon counting software in Singapore, focusing on Asia, probably the leading one there. There's company called Carbon Chain, which is focused specifically on supply chain and shipping and raw materials, stuff like that out of UK. And then there's ANAI here in the Bay area. ing one there. There's company called Carbon Chain, which is focused specifically on supply chain and shipping and raw materials, stuff like that out of UK. And then there's ANAI here in the Bay area. Who knows how this market is going to play out, but this market has carbon accounting customer demand right now, right? So all the large companies of the world have other either promised the government, promised their shareholders or promised the public, or maybe even the employees, they go into decarbonize. They don't always have an idea how to do it. These software platforms is like the plug and play "This is how you do it." And then I'll give you two examples of things you can go into if you don't have any specific domain expertise and just a good software engineer. There's a company called Enode. They are basically building Plaid for EV chargers and Plaid for home energy system. So if we imagine that the future of all homes or future of all charging of EVs is going to be a bunch of energy appliances that are run by small computers, they're all wifi connected, you can connect to them and do things, tell them to turn on, turn off, turn on when it's cheap, turn off when it's whatever, all these different things that are valuable for the energy grid. Then you need a software platform to connect with all of them. And that's what Enode has been building. Another related company is called Static. Static is the Airbnb for EV charging in India. The reason that you need something like that is you don't have Tesla charging. You don't really have public charting in general. People don't have outlets in their garage and they don't have garages. So you need to build a new bottom up EV charging system or platform, and that's what Static has been doing. They're actually building out public charging infrastructure as well, but they have their own app. So if you use a Static app, they'll direct you to all the Static chargers. I believe that they're the biggest or the fastest growing EV charging network in India, which is the second-biggest country, if not the biggest country in the world right now. So the potential of these ideas, even that they're doing well now is just infinite, such an enormous market. If you succeed in one of these things, I don't think we are going to have as many gas stations as we have today and different networks. We're not going to have the same in EV charging. It's going to be a lot more consolidated around the use experience of the end user and the app they open to do this stuff. So I'm pretty convinced that there's real big opportunities for software entrepreneurs to figure this out. There's some companies in the current batch that are focused on this too. The final one I would mention is Heart Aerospace. We have a Heart Aerospace and the Right Electric and a few others focused on aviation. Aviation is another big difficult to decarbonize. Heart and Right are focusing on battery electric planes. So they're basically making commercial airplanes that fly on batteries and flying electric motors and it's incredible to see.…

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