Climactic's Raj Kapoor: "We need 1,000 climate tech unicorns"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Raj Kapoor, co-founder of Climactic, to talk about growing up in Pennsylvania (3:10), his early days in Silicon Valley (8:00), making himself president of the Internet (club) (10:30), his first startup (16:30), Cleantech 1.0 (22:00), joining Lyft (25:00), self-driving cars (28:30), raising a first fund at Climactic (32:15), using software to cut emissions (37:00), and remaking the electric grid (45:00).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology. What is it all about?
0:04.7	We have eight decagorrence today in climate tech, which includes Tesla.
0:09.7	We need 300 by 2030. We have eight today.
0:14.4	Just based on the urgency and need and opportunity.
0:18.3	The innovation gap and how much needs to be spent to get there.
0:23.1	Most of the spend is not venture.
0:24.8	It's spending on infrastructure.
0:26.9	But to support that spend, you need to create these companies.
0:30.6	We need 1,000 unicorns, and there's about 160 today in climate tech.
0:35.9	So the good news is there's 160. The bad news is that we need
0:40.0	a thousand by 2030. Yeah.
1:01.9	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
1:05.9	I'm your host, Danny Forts, and the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times.
1:11.6	And this week, we are talking about one of my favorite topics, climate, climate tech.
1:14.2	On the pod, we have Raj Kapoor.
1:19.4	He is the founder of a newish investment firm called Climactic.
1:28.7	Raj and his co-founder, Josh Felser, have been investing their own cash for a bit over a year in climate tech startups, but they just raised $65 million from outside investors to really formalize what they are doing, which is focusing on climate
1:34.9	tech startups and specifically those leveraging software to make a dent in any number of
1:40.5	industries that have pledged to clean themselves up, but now have to figure out how to do it.
1:46.2	In any event, I want to have Rajan because he comes at this climate thing, having been through all of the Silicon Valley ups and downs,
1:53.6	you know, going back to the early days of the web, doing startups and the dot-com boom, having huge successes,
2:00.1	and also things that just didn't work.
	...

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