What gives you hope?

Just the sheer scale of people getting involved these days, and the scale of their ideas.  When I first started mentoring environmental teams at Stanford years ago, it might be 1 team a quarter.  Now it is 30-40.  And the scale of the ideas of smaller.  Entrepreneurs today have learned from the last 30 years how to build and deploy global scale innovations.  History has taught us that society has a long history of meeting the challenges it chooses to focus on.  Seeing the level of focus and energy expended in this space suggests to me that we are going to see incredibly rapid gains in the next 10-20 years.

How do you add value for founders?

One thing we have observed over years of watching great companies scale is that the highest performing have mastered the “time spent to value created” relationship i.e. how can you spend the least amount of time while delivering the highest value? So, from the moment we invest, that is our focus.  How can we help you connect with and understand customers faster?  How do you efficiently scale your organization…your team, operations, brand etc.  We are coninually building our library of trusted partners across those key categories… anything to help reduce the time our founders need to spend to get the desired outcome.

If you could wave your magic wand to change one thing in this space, what would it be?

Behavior…100%.  Everything we are facing as a society today is a result of choices made by individuals…at the consumer, corporate and policy level.  And those choices were made based on the information or belief system people had at the time.  The fastest path to real change is to improve the information to update the belief systems, resulting in different choices.  This is especially true for the low hanging fruit, where the better decision results in a better environmental outcome.  That is one of the first questions we ask ourselves before we invest.

What are your pet peeves?

Ha ha…some people know this from my LinkedIn profile.  For a long time it was the single use soaps and shampoos in hotels.  Really?  We can’t do better than that?  But some great advances are happening in that space.  So am moving on to materials.  I am incredibly frustrated by the lack of good options when looking for performance or fashion based clothing that doesn’t include plastics.  On a much broader scale,  I am constantly frustrated by lack of choice when it comes to modern life.  Poorly designed cities, our transportation infrastructure, how we power our digital ecosystem, the carbon footprint of today’s modern society.  These are all things I would like to see solved in my lifetime.

What is a perfect day?

A perfect work day is working with people who want to make change at scale… founders, team members, co-investors, customers, policy makers, LP’s.  Nothing better than sitting down with a committed team of people and moving towards a shared goal…so energizing.  At the personal level, a perfect day usually involves spending time with family or friends in the outdoors.  When you strip it all down, we need so little to be happy and at peace.  The sense of awe you get from immersing yourself in natural ecosystems is magical.