Jim McDermott - Clean Energy Pioneer | Why Smart Entrepreneurs Are Betting Everything on Climate Solutions
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story Media
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2025
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Jim McDermott is a veteran entrepreneur who scaled Stamps.com into a $2B+ public company. He co-founded Archive.com and Spoke Software, leading multiple successful exits, and managed over $800M in cleantech assets through US Renewables Group and Rusheen Capital. With $1B+ in enterprise value created, he brings decades of experience building high-impact ventures in tech and climate innovation.
➡️ Show Links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesacmcdermott/
➡️ Podcast Sponsors
Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/
Cornbread Hemp - https://cornbreadhemp.com/success (Code: Success)
iDigress Podcast - https://idigress.show
NetSuite — https://netsuite.com/scottclary/
Indeed - https://indeed.com/clary
➡️ Talking Points
00:00 – Intro
01:32 – From Dotcoms to Climate Tech
05:14 – The Problems Entrepreneurs Are Solving Today
10:24 – Why Most Ideas Aren’t Deep Enough
15:31 – How to Tackle Massive Problems
19:56 – Turning CO2 Into Opportunity
23:29 – Sponsor Break
25:38 – What the Government Gets Wrong About Climate
33:40 – Jim’s Ideal Future Energy Mix
44:13 – Smart Investing in Climate Tech
52:26 – Sponsor Break
54:04 – The Problem with Climate Doom
58:33 – Advice for Young Climate Entrepreneurs
1:02:38 – One Belief That Changed Everything
1:06:58 – Final Words of Wisdom
1:15:44 – The Lesson Jim Wants His Kids to Know
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | HubSpot is a success story partner. Now, if you're an entrepreneur, listen up because HubSpot |
| 0:06.1 | makes impossible growth, impossibly easy for their customers. If you are building a business, |
| 0:12.1 | you need to get HubSpot. Why? Here's the perfect example. Morehouse College needed to reach |
| 0:17.0 | new students with fresh engaging content, a problem that every single business in the world |
| 0:21.6 | has. But with a 900 page website, even the tiniest update took 30 minutes to publish. Now, Breeze, |
| 0:30.0 | which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, helped them write and optimize their content |
| 0:35.1 | in a fraction of the time. And the results, 30% more page |
| 0:39.1 | views and visitors now spend 27% more time on their site. If you are ready for impossible |
| 0:45.5 | growth like this, visit HubSpot.com. You have to look at the consumption of electricity, |
| 0:51.3 | whether it's crypto or large language models, how much economic value are they producing? |
| 0:56.9 | Large portion of crypto, I don't think they create enough economic benefit to justify why they electricity that they consume. |
| 1:03.9 | He doesn't chase trends. He builds the future quietly, deliberately, and with a mission. |
| 1:08.8 | Jim McDermott is the mind behind over 25 companies from |
| 1:11.7 | Stamps.com, which he took public, to groundbreaking climate tech ventures that were acquired |
| 1:16.2 | by giants like LG Kim and Occidental. You need to go solve as an entrepreneur, the problem |
| 1:20.8 | that you find most interesting. I think that climate is the single greatest economic |
| 1:25.3 | opportunity to the next 50 years. And this is one of the things that's really important climate is. There's a lot of people who in the discussion are like, well, it's either wind and solar, which is zero emission, or it's natural gas, which is emissions. That's not true. You can make a natural gas power plant that emits no CO2. It just costs more money. He's not just a founder. He's an architect of sustainability, launching startups before the world realized how much they'd need them. |
| 1:48.0 | Jim's work sits at the intersection of deep science, serious capital, and real world impact. |
| 1:53.0 | Most people talk about saving the planet. |
| 1:54.0 | He's out here building the tools to do it. |
| 1:56.0 | Find people who are good at taking technologies, deploying them, and building them into real businesses, |
| 2:01.5 | invest with them. The true mark of success is not whether or not you get something right. It's |
... |
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