Why venture capital is crucial to the climate fight with Gabriel Kra
Zero: The Climate Race
Bloomberg
4.8 • 296 Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2022
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What role does venture capital have in bringing carbon-cutting technologies to reality? Does it prop up bad ideas or free outrageous ones? In this episode, Bloomberg Green’s Akshat Rathi talks to Gabriel Kra of Prelude Ventures about the role venture capital plays in boosting the US cleantech industry and how the new US climate bill is changing the startup landscape.
Read more about the battery startup QuantumScape that Kra mentions as a key success story for VC funding.
Read a full transcript of this episode, here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Zero. I am Akshadrati. |
| 0:03.0 | This week, getting arrested, getting lucky, and finally getting a climate bill. |
| 0:13.0 | This summer, I went to the US and spent three weeks visiting climate startups and talking to investors who give those startups money. |
| 0:25.6 | One of those conversations spoke particularly well to the role that venture capital plays in funding climate tech. |
| 0:32.2 | The model of venture capital is to make many bets. |
| 0:36.4 | Yes. |
| 0:36.7 | Early on. Yes. Risky bets. Yes. Very few many bets. Yes. Early on. |
| 0:37.9 | Yes. |
| 0:38.3 | Risky bets. |
| 0:39.3 | Yes. |
| 0:39.6 | Very few will succeed. |
| 0:41.3 | Yes. |
| 0:42.4 | What succeeds? |
| 0:44.4 | How much of that is luck? |
| 0:49.3 | That's an interesting question. |
| 0:52.2 | I don't think it is luck. I don't think that's the right word. |
| 0:59.5 | Chance. No, no, no. It's almost like it's not the right concept. That's Gabriel Kraw, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Prelude. Now venture capital is both loved and hated. |
| 1:13.3 | Some say it's the only way to fund companies that change the world. Others say it is unaccountable, |
| 1:19.3 | it can gain markets, and it can launder reputations. That's the black and white version of |
| 1:24.5 | the narrative. And you'd be surprised how many smart people |
| 1:28.3 | buy into it. Gabriel is someone who is comfortable in the grey zone. He started his |
| 1:33.3 | career in the 90s as a Greenpeace activist, even getting arrested on the steps of the |
... |
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