Latest / Second Nature / E186 Ollie Potter & Kevin Webb: The Nature Tech Revolution

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E186 Ollie Potter & Kevin Webb: The Nature Tech Revolution · Second Nature

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_05: Do you know Tim Kristofferson?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_06: Personally, no.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_06: So, vice president of nature at Salesforce, headed up the decade of nature restoration at the UN.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_06: Really amazing guy, like one of the most connected people across sector.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_06: When we went out to San Francisco Climate Week, he got me invited to this event at Salesforce Tower, where it was their launch pad programme.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_05: Did we talk about this in the phone?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_06: Briefly.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_06: So they sponsor like 20 new startups each year.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_06: It's the ones they've invested in.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_06: And it was this almost private coaching session with them, and the two keynote speakers were the head of the US Phanthropic.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_06: And do you watch the 20 VC podcast?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_06: So Jason, the guy who owns Sastra, his number two.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_06: They were doing this like masterclass.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm sat there, I'm like, how the hell am I in this room?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_06: This is ridiculous.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_06: And she was teaching that the reason Sastra are so uh advanced on agents is they lost a third of their team being headhunted by others, offering them like 10 times salary and couldn't afford to replace them.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_06: So they were like, right, we need to set up an agent force to do this quickly, and then Salesforce called theirs agent force.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_06: But and the bit she taught was, and and they literally went down to the nuts and bolts of how they built everything.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_06: It's just like, whatever you do, do not try and get any of the agents to do more than one thing.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_06: It's like that's where it goes to shit.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_06: So actually, as much as I feel this pull to make the system more elegant, it's a bit like, well, it works in its fundamental bits.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_06: So if I try bolting it together, actually, am I going to make the individual functions worse to make it more elegant?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_03: I go through like a honeymoon phase where I'll try a new tool.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: Like I've tried pretty much every productivity tool on the market.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: I'll use it for about two months and then it'll either kind of live or live or die.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I always just end up going back to simplicity.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: So like Apple Notes, uh a Kanban board, and an efficient calendar.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_06: And then that's like I am a massive calendar geek.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_06: Like it's um coloured.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_06: I'm colourblind, so that's last time.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, I'm so sorry.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_06: I just yeah.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_06: And and seven-day calendar.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_06: That's been like um nice marriage harmony.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_06: Because my wife's like, I know where you are during the week.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_06: It I if it's not in at the weekend, I don't know what you're gonna be doing.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_06: So we literally program seven days a week, so everyone knows where and a shared calendar at home.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_06: So there's no communication as to where you are and what you haven't done that you're supposed to.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my my fiance runs AI tools for her company.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, so uh she has gotten extraordinarily clod pilled, and consequently, you know, she's working on things that are for you know, a multiple thousand-person organization, uh, and they're quite sophisticated.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'm like a child who's picking up what I can.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but even with just that, um, I think our our guiding philosophy for how we're trying to integrate AI is to use it as much as possible for stitching together the different functions that are built to be in silos, right?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so we have Notion, we have email, we have uh our CRM, all of these different things are not necessarily built to be integrated unless you want to pay substantially more, which we don't want to.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so being able to do that, try to take away the tax of all of these switching costs and then get to the insights and the questions that you want to be able to get after.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and my hope out of all of this is that we can focus on the thing that really matters more, which is the human elements, right?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: You wanna at the end of the day, when we're making an investment, you want to be able to judge who the person is and what the idea is.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of other noise that you can you can dig in on um and that you should.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if you can use the AI to help on those things so that you can get back to real fundamental basics, that's really incredible.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_06: Do you wish you'd had the tools earlier, or are you glad you didn't?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tough question.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think this idea that if you don't start doing everything now, you're sunk.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a little bit a little misguided.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the reason for that is every additional month that happens, the the abstractions get more sophisticated, right?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so something that I could have spent weeks or months building a year or two ago, I could do on a weekend now or in a couple hours sometimes, right?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so I don't think we need to be fear-mongering about it, but I do think that there is incredible value to be able to use whatever the systems at your disposal are today and being fluent in that.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the value, uh the the time to value coming out of it is just so satisfying.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: I agree.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's the most powerful when it's the pipes that connect, tools that don't communicate.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess case in point with the newsletter when we started three years ago, our kind of CRM of people that we wanted to get on to write with was Emmanuel Kanban.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: It was me and Patrick going through it every Friday.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: Now I get a a morning briefing on a Monday that looks at that, looks at all of my LinkedIn messages, looks at all of my emails and goes, okay, where is the where is the best use of my hour before the work day to focus on to focus our resource?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_03: And as a result, I think I'm probably doing kind of twice as much as I was three years ago, just because those communicate those tools are all communicating and telling me where to focus my attention.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_06: I keep rebuilding and deleting and starting again some kind of like morning briefing on so I get an amazing briefing from uh the market.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_06: So the team built this amazing thing that comes through with everything natural capital, everything AI, everything tech, everything luxury and premium products, because we try and align our branding on carbon and nature to pure premium in that.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_06: So it's like what can I learn from that?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_06: And actually, what big sports deals are happening across the world?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_06: Because I think often the structuring of those, there's something you can borrow and learn from and apply it in a different context.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_06: So we call that our emergent research piece.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_06: So that is literally a what's happening in the world type thing, which will land on my desk and I'll circulate that to bits of the team that want to coach on something.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_06: So that bit is nailed down and I really love it.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_06: People build their own like morning briefings that come through with their calendars and their tasks, and they I cannot get one that I feel like it adds value.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it just comes through, and I'm like, you're just telling me what I know or suggesting that I write to Demis Asabis.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm like, I can't do that.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_06: Like, stop telling me to get him on the podcast.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_06: It's like, that's not like make this realistic, and then it'll be like, and it'll swing either violently back to get this person on the podcast.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_06: They were on last week.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_06: Why are you doing this?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I can't nail that one down yet.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_06: And it maybe just doesn't work for my workflow, but I um do you still look after your own emails?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, 100%.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_06: I so I we're 50 people in a team now, and it pushes always, oh, you get to a point, let your PA do that, don't do it.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_06: I don't want to, I don't want to give up that sort of flow past of info.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_06: No, because that's where I find signals.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_06: And I think it's a feature of how I work.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_06: But people push you too.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_06: As you get bigger, they're like, oh no, no, you shouldn't be looking at your email, you should be focused on important CEO-y things.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm like, I don't want to give it up.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've worked with hundreds of CEOs now, and I think some of the best are some of the fastest at replying, right?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you reply quickly to to an email, one, you've got an organization you're in charge of.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: You're one of your primary functions, apart from setting the direction of the company, is unblocking everyone else.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so you set a precedent, you set an expectation, um, and you make things happen faster.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I, but this is one that I learned from my dad, uh, and probably the best, most obsessive person on email I've ever met.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um and my my first job, uh, one of my first roles out of school was uh trying to help with his calendar and email.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I was, you know, a 22-year-old out of college and awful at it.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was so bad.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think I I churned out of that exact role in a week.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I've since come around to uh we got to work together for eight plus years.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: I've since come around to uh his way of thinking on it.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's super important.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: I think this YC actually tracked, did an experiment, one of the partners at YC tracked this and they looked at average reply time for their most successful founders, and it was it was in the minutes or hours, yeah.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas those that kind of didn't didn't make it was day one, day two later.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_06: So how many things, how many opportunities are time dependent?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_06: And if you if you're not on it, you're just gonna miss stuff.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, that's not to say that you need to reply to everything.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the things that's really that's been tough for me to reckon with as someone who wants to reply to everything, is there's so much there's so much less friction in sending an email now with with AI generated notes.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost impossible.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes the filtering settings are wrong and you miss stuff, but still, I think trying for that is worth it.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_06: Do you um do you find it difficult to say no to stuff?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of the job.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's never easy when you're excited about the person or you're excited about the idea, or there's elements, or you're a split partnership, or whatever else.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, at the end of the day, you we're gonna invest in one out of every hundred deals we see.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's part of the nature of it, unfortunately.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: The one that's gotten harder for me is people asking for career advice.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I've had to say no to that more uh as we grew our own team and just had fewer cycles.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I'd like to be able to do more of it.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why does that feel hard?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's good karma, right?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's putting out into the ecosystem.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: You're hopefully helping someone else on their career.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: I've been given a lot of gifts on on the way.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_06: You must get that a lot, like through the profile so big on LinkedIn, you must get that all the time.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: We do a lot, but I think it is a balance, right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: It it was a lot easier a couple of years ago to to say yes to everything exactly for that reason.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I think now I will try and do as much as I can kind of asynchronously.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and if I don't have the right answer, point them to someone that they should.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: Like a resource or yeah, a resource.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_03: Often actually a lot of the time we've written about the stuff, or we've got a uh a database of nature tech startups that if they're looking to go and get into the space, say let's start here, the look at these top ten and go and speak, go and uh I'm probably clogging up some of the founders' inboxes as a result, but I see it as I'm helping them hiring.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: But um, yeah, I think it it is trickier when when we're all time scarce, right?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_06: I um I have the exact same emotional loop that you do in that um I I was the first person in my family to finish school, never mind uni, and uh and a random recruiter who saw a CV helped me get a job that he couldn't even get paid for helping.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, he was just kind.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_06: I I can see the guy's face still.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_06: This is 25 years ago.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_06: I I can't remember his name.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and if I ever say no, I always think he didn't say no.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_06: So you help as many as you can, or I try and connect someone up with somebody or at least move it forward.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_06: But it I there's very few people who are where they are without some luck or help or 100%.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'll I'll do things that are a little bit more scaled almost every opportunity I get.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a a biodiversity class at Columbia that I've spoken at every semester for the last two or three years now, since it started, you know.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_06: So beautiful segue into London Climate Week.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_06: So that we're we're Thursday.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_06: Is it Thursday?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_06: Excellent.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_06: Thursday morning.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_06: So we're kind of wrapping up most of the week because in my experience these things tend to be most ferocious Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_06: What have your weeks been like?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: I've been, as we said before, slightly more selective this year.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: Just uh I've been at some incredible events.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: That was such a smile if I got this right.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_06: Because we walked in NACA on so many events, and he's like, that was a good decision, being very selective.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think what differentiates the best events now are where people aren't pay to play and they've they've turned up because they're building something incredible.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um and all of the events I've been at this this time have been that.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: So I think you know, you go and hear people like Dimble speak or like uh Jalal from epoch, they're they're always on the panels.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, they're awesome.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um kind of last mile supply chain transparency, is that a fair summary?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: They one of your companies.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, but they work with several VCs we know and love.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: So they're San they Sand River investors.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: You had them on the podcast.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and you go and hear kind of some of the leading builders in our space uh talk and it's always just an incredible, absolutely incredible event.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_03: So my week has been full of those.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_06: I think you're right on the pay-to-play thing.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_06: So uh full disclosure, we hired a theatre on Monday morning.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_06: So I suppose we strictly speaking paid for the building, but outside of that, I I just point blank refuse to pay to speak on things because A, we're very fortunate to have quite a reach anyway.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_05: But it just feels so disingenuous.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_06: I I just think yes, host an event, yes, like feed people, give them beverages, like make people welcome by all means.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_06: But the sort of paying to speak at event, it just I struggle with it conceptually.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think then if you're in that position where you have, you're then doing the cost benefit of how can I pitch something or get a return for from having paid for the seat?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: That's interesting.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, my mindset on that isn't when we do so.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_06: So I've done 13 events the team will have been at, or hosted 48.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_06: It's always what can we give the people?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, what are you looking for from the nothing?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_06: Just to share, grow, explain stuff, try and help things along.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_06: What about you?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_06: How have you approached the week?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great question.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: So, our our biggest week is New York Climate Week.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: Last year we did nine different events, or co-host hosted or co-hosted nine different events, including one really big one.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then some of those were just you sign your name up.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: We always do a Birding and Bagels event during New York Climate Week that's open to everyone.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um relatively easy.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: We bring a bunch of conservationists in.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this week we only co-hosted three different events.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so two of them are done.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Once tonight, Machines in the Wild with Aria and Pillar.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we're really excited about that.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there is something to be said about bringing together the people that you want.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, our mission here, actually, maybe I should step back and say, why come to London Climate Week?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, for us as biodiversity-focused investors, I think London and the UK generally have a number of different threads that we've been watching really closely.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, all of our team is based in the US, but I think the UK has this cultural fascination with rewilding, which is, to me, a very optimistic thing because you have a country that has such a, I don't want to call it environmental degradation, but a very altered landscape, right?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: And there's there's not a lot of place in the collective imagination for what did this landscape look like?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: What did wildlife look like in this place?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's a uh NEP is incredible.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: The work that you all are doing is incredible.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's it's a relatively recent phenomenon to start bringing that back.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And to have, you know, you go, I love going into a bookshop and to see the the stacks of books there that are just focused on rewilding.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like that anywhere else I've been.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got that, you've got incredible universities, you've got a great understanding of the financial ecosystem.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, there's some really incredible founders who are coming out.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: We just backed a new one out of the Aria Pillar program.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: She hasn't announced the company, so I won't say who it is, but um, she'll be at this Machines in the Wild event tonight.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh so that's that's why we come to London.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so my week has been spending time with allocators, with uh with uh entrepreneurs um and peers that come to these things.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: You get a lot of that time in a very short amount of time.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think the single biggest new thing for me is I've come the last two years.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: This year I came with Kit McDonnell, our head of ecosystem, um, who's just been amazing and making a lot of things happen.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then in her own right, being able to uh just have conversations with literally any room we go into, bring her own expertise.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: She comes out of Ginkgo Bioworks and lands at tech and um you know has this incredible ability to merge design and uh ecology and and she's off camera and smiling, so at the risk risk of making her blush.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that was the purpose.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_06: Well, magically charismatic as well, where you have that spot where they walk into a room and the whole room comes I mean, I saw she kindly came to our theater performance of the podcast on Monday, and you almost get the the sort of waiting air after it.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_06: People angle themselves to people like that.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah, and they're like a uh almost have a gravitational pull in a in a room.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_06: They're very special.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: I told her this after New York Climate Week.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: So she just joined last year in summer, and that was by far the best one we've ever done.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of it is because I felt like I could be in a room and be present.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like I didn't have to worry about what was happening or what the dynamics were.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: I just felt like I could be present with the people who were there.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that is this a bit weird.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: Just start looking on at her phone.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_06: We were talking earlier, weren't we, about how it takes a team to do a climate week.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_06: These things are unless you're just styling it out like you are in on your like doorstep.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_06: Um, it takes a team and planning and logistics, and then to do them properly, they're marathons because they are big investments of time, money, and resource.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, there's people that come across kind of who will travel to something, do one or two when we were in San Fran and those guys like, oh, we did one event today, maybe one tomorrow.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_06: Like, sorry, what are you doing?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_06: Like, because you're not somewhere else that could be growing your business, yet you're coming here and doing one thing.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_06: Whereas there's so much to learn and see and do and share.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_06: I just think you've got to really stack it out if you're gonna be in a place.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_06: Second time across in London?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Third time for London Climate Week.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I've been a bunch of times over the past several years.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: How have the climate weeks changed over those three years?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think they've gotten better.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, the the nature of a climate week is it's really choose your own adventure.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like I come out of New York Climate Week every week and come with the conclusion, oh yeah, everyone's talking about nature.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: But that's entirely, you know, bias.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um be like, everyone's talking about how Web3 is going to save the world, right?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if you go into those rooms.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um so for me, maybe I'm getting invited to more things, or maybe I'm doing a better job of putting things together, but it feels great, um, apart from the temperature.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: I I yes, exactly.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think you're right.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: But I actually, if we I think we first met three and a half, four years ago, yeah, probably the drop.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_06: And I think then there was Is that your uh sphere of consciousness about climate weeks?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_06: Four or five of them?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yes.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so when we met at the drop about three or four years ago, I think there's probably two or three investors that were kind of really in this nature space.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember distinctly having a conversation.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: So the drop is a big conference in in Malmo.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and we were gonna say, well, maybe in three or four drops time, there'll be a big there'll be a collective of us.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: And if you now look at the agenda for this year, there's a whole nature side of the program.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: So I do think we do operate within this bubble, but I'm I'm confident this kind of the ecosystem is definitely growing, and the number of events and the number of panels that we're actually uh actually having is is definitely a higher volume than it was three or four years ago.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_06: When so this is bizarrely, the first London one we've properly done.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_06: So my first a year ago, we announced uh that we'd broke the world record for the highest price for a carbon credit in London.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_06: We did one single event to do that announcement, and outside of it, we didn't do anything else.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_06: It's a good reason for an event.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_05: Uh we enjoyed it.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it was good.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_06: It was good.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_06: Um, actually, there's a tale of two stories to that.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_06: So we did that panel, and then literally, as we did the announcement, half the team went off and did media stuff, and I got taken to another panel, and it was the example of what bad panels look like.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_06: So it was chaired by this professor, I won't say where from, um, but there were four of us on the panel, and the panel was do a monologue for 15 minutes and then move to the next person and end.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_06: And it was this big blacked-out warehouse where you could barely see the audience, where you have like the channeled headphones on where there's multiple rooms.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_06: I was on the panel and I was falling asleep.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_06: Like, the only thing that kept me awake is Esmi, our amazing nature lead, was sat in the front row pulling faces at me.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_06: It was the only thing I was like, that's not a panel, that's just bad.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_06: What are we doing?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_06: So, anyway, first climate week I'd ever did was that.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_06: And then we went straight out to New York.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_06: I was like, wow, that is just sensory overloading.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_06: And it was my first time I'd ever been in New York as well.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_06: Are you serious?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_06: So it was just an incredible experience.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_06: And then I was like, right, is this a normal climate week?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_06: Because everyone tells you, no, no, no, New York is like the most ferocious, fast-paced, biggest one.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_06: And we we did it hard, like we were falling asleep every night.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_06: Yep, like in dinner, event, event, event.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_06: And I realized each one of them, as you say, it's your own adventure, but you can come back, you can't set what the theme of the week's going to be like before you go.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_06: But because you come away, you're like, what was that week for me?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_06: And New York was the capital explosion.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_06: So for the first time, every every room was filled with bankers and investors, and it was money.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_06: It was draped in money for the first time.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_06: And whereas in the UK, when we'd have a conversation about what we were doing, the beer, oh, is it morally the right thing to do to value?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_06: Should we be doing it?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_06: Are we improving things in the right way?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_06: And I would voice that question in New York, people like, what are you talking about?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_06: That's not a fact.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_06: The question was, can you prove you're doing it?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_06: Is there permanency there?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_06: Are you making a return?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_06: What did that look like?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_06: So New York for me, I was like, that is the capital version of Climate Week.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_06: We then went to San Fran, and I was like, This is of so that was April?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_06: I was like, um, this has got to be AI themed.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_06: And we get off the plane and it's like, every billboard is at AI.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_06: Don't have humans, agents.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_06: And I was like, that was exactly what I wanted.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_06: Like, we went for that.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_06: So New York was capital.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_06: Sanfran was it was a tech week with a smearing of nature and climate on the back end of it.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_06: So you come here and then we did Zurich.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_06: Zurich was incredible.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, really?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_06: Zurich was impact.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_06: So we stood outside the opening ceremony, which was in the a beautiful like opera house, and it was just um there was an operatic performance to open it.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_06: And the opera house in Zurich is all like frescoes of like ancient figures around.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_06: And it was a bit like they were judging us, they were all looking down, like, well, you better do something serious while you're here on these paintings.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_06: And uh, I met the the guy who was curating Nick, who was curating the whole event, the sort of chief exec of it.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_06: And I said, What is it gonna be like?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_06: And he's like, My hope is it's about actually doing things and action and people sharing what it is and not conversation.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_06: I'm like, okay, that's a statement.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_06: Let's see where, and it was without a shadow of a doubt, it absolutely was.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_06: And the insurance company was so prominent there, and so Google were all over it.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_06: I didn't realise Zurich's the biggest offices outside the US for Google, but they were everywhere.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_06: It was really about actually doing things.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_06: So we're collecting capital, we're collecting tech.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_06: Zurich was about doing things.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_06: So I came here and I was like, what on earth is this week gonna be like?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_06: And the UK's been a bit sad for the past few months, and the government don't exist anymore, evidently, and changing prime minister every time.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_06: But it actually feels like, um, building on your point about it growing, it feels like the sector's arrived this week.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_06: It feels serious and optimistic and professional.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_06: And the big culmination for me last night was we got invited to a drinks reception with BlackRock.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_06: And five years ago, my jovial point was well, we'll know it's serious when BlackRock are involved and come in and look at this.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_06: And we stood there last night with a room full of people, and that has what this week's felt like.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_06: It has felt like a maturity and a momentum.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_06: And it's all those last five years founding and building.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Was that event about climate, nature?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_06: Uh yes, it was about what opportunities are for investment at a serious scale in nature, in climate, and that them positioning nature as critical infrastructure.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_06: Awesome.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_06: And and it was just this week has felt it's it's exceeded my expectations tenfold.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_06: And I didn't come in particularly optimistic about it.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_06: I present optimistic because evidently that's just what I sound.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_06: But I wasn't.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_06: So it's the it's the coffee.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_03: I've loved every minute of it.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's incredible as a week.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm really bullish on the UK ecosystem.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of my uh main talking points.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: I think through three reasons.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: Firstly, we we did write a lot of the playbook with Das Gupta and you know countless other names.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: I think secondly, we've got just such an incredible industrial heritage.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: If you look at Dyson, you look at some of the steelworks that we used to have, as you were starting to move into more hardware, there's a real opportunity there for the next wave of companies in that space, like Ulysses, uh, like ARIA.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then thirdly, AI talent density.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, there's a huge amount said about that in in the US, in San Fran, in New York.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: But if you look at the type of AI talent that we have here for science, like the Sanger Institute, like Google DeepMind, I think we're we're hitting with we're hitting up there with San Fran in in that kind of specific area.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I am always incredibly bullish on the UK ecosystem.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: Did did you talk about biodiversity net getting there?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I didn't, but that's also I'd love to say your take on that.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh I'm gonna be the least the expert on this particular project group.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: But um, yeah, it's one of the things that we're watching, right?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is uh it's taken wetland mitigation banking in the US to the next level.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: And while details of implementation may be tricky and there's more to be be honed out, just the the idea of if you're developing a parcel, you need to be nature positive overall.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh simple conceptually, uh and really targeted.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it it creates this wave of opportunities that then become investable for someone like me.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that's part of why we get really interested here.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And we do think that um, you know, even if we don't believe yet the rest of the world has caught up, this is kind of like a glimpse of what the future could look like if it continues to go the way that it has so far.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_06: Every every room we've been in where we've done a QA from the audience, which I I they're my favorite bits of these events you get.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, 100%.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_06: An American has asked the question in every room so far.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_06: I think it's super exciting how many from your part of the world are coming across.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_06: Is that a response to the sort of Trumpian government and what it's feeling like at home, do you think?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_06: Or has there always been this influx of US talent and people coming to London Climate Week?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I would just venture a guess that your audiences are gonna be biased uh in a certain direction.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: Not I think if you were to talk to an average American, you're not gonna hear about biodiversity net gain, would it would be a wager there.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's an optimistic policy.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it feels maybe extraordinarily naively like it's it's something that doesn't have to be partisan the same way.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and it it also stems from a place of sympathy, right?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's not uh you can't build anywhere.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh here are the guiding principles, use that to choose the parcels that you're gonna work on and what you do on them, and here are the things you can do.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: But it's still important that you do the thing you need to do, right?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think some of the environmental policies that we've we've used in the US have uh played a really important role in how we preserve so many species and ecosystems.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: But um, you know, they're showing their age in some places, and I think that's leading to some friction.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_06: Do you ever find yourself um getting those ideas or concepts that are so hiding in plain sight?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_06: When someone points it out, you're like, how on earth did I miss that?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_06: So I chaired a panel for Clifford Chancellor law firm yesterday morning.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_06: And Adam Hedley's one of their partners, and he's one of a handful of the leading experts in the world at carbon credits and the laws about that.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_06: And he advocated that actually there's every regulation and rule we need in the UK to protect the environment.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_06: Yes, but there's no stimulus or carrot to make it better.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_06: And I was like, oh shit, regulation can be an incentive as well.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_06: And I was so stuck in because all the regulations we deal with are slowing things down and stopping, even the good.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_06: I'd forgotten it was possible for it to do the alternative.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_06: So he flagged that and he was talking about how we needed more carrots and incentives.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_06: Is that stuff you guys have thought about?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think because of some of the regulations that have weakened and watered down, I think there's a sense in the space that companies that built their business models around that purely uh have struggled.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um leaves you quite exposed, doesn't it?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: So actually, I think what we've seen with with a lot of companies over the last couple of years, as that's happened, is they've they've sharpened the pencil, gone back to drawing board, and actually focused on okay, what besides regulation, and if we're in a world where that regulation wasn't in place, what value are we putting out into the ecosystem?
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: And if it's not cheaper, faster, cleaner, more efficient than currently I think you're you're gonna struggle.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_06: The example Adam put on the table was renewable energy in the UK.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_06: So in two and I checked the stats this morning, in 2010, 7% of our energy came from renewables.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_06: It's now 50%.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_06: Great.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_06: And the argument there is that it was the the contract of difference, so the government underpinning a price saying, we will guarantee you a price of X for your electricity.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_06: If you can get a higher price, great, push on.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_06: That was the big catalyst.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_06: So in the room, it was well, could the same thing happen for carbon credits?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_06: Could it happen for nature credits?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_06: And would that actually be a positive incentive for the market as opposed to just forcing it on people?
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, I would love to see more of this.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Good policy can certainly incentivize good behavior and using the power of government to not say here's specifically the technology we want, but here's the conclusion that we want.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the shape of it.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then you can incentivize uh something like a SpaceX, right?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_06: Let's let's talk about SpaceX.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_06: Oh boy.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_06: What what did what did you guys make of the IPO?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was a great return for investors.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's critical infrastructure for a part of the economy that was not created de novo, but um that is enabling so many different things now.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's hard to see uh an economy without a SpaceX there.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_06: I I think the visualization of the number of satellites in space over time, where it shows like one a year, one a year, one a year, then it gets to when SpaceX arrives, it's like a thousand every month.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_06: Bam, bam, bam.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is why we're backing startups, right?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if we could be so lucky as to find a SpaceX for nature, uh, then you know, we could keep doing this for a very long time.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, you you pick the right business model, you solve a core problem, you do it really well, and the world is your oyster.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so uh I'd say overall positive on it.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was really exciting.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: So put the valuation to one side.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: What what is it going to enable in our ecosystem if Starlink is more prolific?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: Uh a huge amount of kind of last mile connectivity, a huge amount of farmers that have access to to mod both models and connectivity that they've got.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: We have Starlink across all of our rural estates.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh IoT for wildlife monitoring and and uh you know true in-the-field baseline monitoring.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_03: And the ability for hardware to be deployed in remote locations now, really exciting.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so I am bullish on what it's going to do for the ecosystem.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I won't comment on the pr on the current price.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_03: I I was listening.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: Are you familiar with the acquired podcast?
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_06: Somewhat.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_06: Oh you happy Christmas, boys.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_06: You are cool five-hour deep dives on the history of businesses in very much a free economics style approach where they sort of detail you through it, analyze how things change, and they've done the they only do the biggest sort of brands.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_06: So Ferrari, LBMH, they've done a three-parter on the chapters of Google, and it's amazing.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_06: Sod.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_06: When they were doing, I'll send links after the show.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_06: When um when they were doing the Google read, so I did a keynote for Google a couple of weeks ago.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_06: So I went back and listened to the history to prep for this keynote.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_06: So we try and pair it all together.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_06: When Google first raised at like a couple of hundred million, the exact same response about the price was made like, this is ludicrous, this will never be a thing, it's such a massive number.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_06: And ultimately, the world catches up.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_06: Like those outliers move the market for a reason.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_06: The thing I'm so excited about, the IPO, is the excitement and the rush for retail investment.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_06: Because I think if we fast forward 2032, I want to be IPOing oxygen in the UK because um, so I don't know if it made it all the way across to your part of the world, but Foresight's Sustainable Forestry Fund actually IPO'd a few years ago, 150 million somewhere in that ilk, but they were massively oversubscribed by retail investors that they never expected.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_06: So we've had Richard Kelly, their MD on the podcast, talking about it.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_06: I think if you see where the world's going, you know, we're five years old as a business.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_06: A lot of the companies in the sector that have been speaking on panels this week, five years has pretty much been the UK natural capital cycle.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_06: So Environment Bank, us all five years, Islands Rewilding, Natagal, all in the last five years.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_06: You give us another five or six years, things are easier now.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_06: There's more people, there's more talent, there's more momentum in the sector.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_06: And I think if you align that with a climate that, you know, we're sat in 36 degree heat at 8 a.m.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_06: in the morning, this will be the norm in five or six years.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_06: And then you add that to the fact that the Greta Thumbo generation is coming out of university now, and in five or six years, they're gonna be in executive positions making decisions and read.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_06: I just there will be an IPO in the nature space at a scale.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_06: I hope it's us.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_06: If it's not, it just needs to be somebody.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_06: And that's what I was so excited about the SpaceX deal.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_06: I'd buy stock.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I appreciate that.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_06: I appreciate that.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_06: Um, just before we get away from the big IPOs, we're gonna see anthropic and open AI go this year as well, do we think?
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm no expert.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Seems seems promising.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: If I were in their shoes, I would it would be hard not to consider that option.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, I'm sure not my area of expertise.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_03: However, I think it's an interesting data center conversation there as well.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: And it comes back to there's a whole convers the whole can of worms there about uh land use and water and energy use as well.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_06: I think I think we should open that.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_06: Is um data centers and AI fundamentally good or bad for the environment?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: I'm slightly controversial on this topic.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think You're in the right place.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: Look, I I think there are arguments on both sides, and I think a lot of those arguments get carried and amplified.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: So water, for example.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: I think are current data centers in their current format very water intensive?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: Should we do something about it and consider it in our citing decisions and where we're investing in technology to improve that?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_03: But we ran some of the numbers on it and a hundred megawatt data center according there's a huge amount of variety in this, but we'll go with we'll go with some generalizations.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: UK government says a hundred megawatt data center consumes about two billion litres of water, which is a huge amount for a year.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_03: A golf course, an 18-hole golf course consumes about 20% of that.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_03: So the average golf course has 500 members, a hundred megawatt data center serves millions of people a year.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_06: Interesting.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if if you get into beef or what we reared to feed beef, it's orders of magnitude more than that.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_06: Annie's nodding behind camera because she made that exact point about agriculture as like a mic drop moment last night and just kind of walked away.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_03: So so I think I I think look, uh does that mean we shouldn't invest in making these day these pieces of infrastructure more water efficient?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_03: We absolutely should.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_03: But there's also billions going into that already because it makes sense for the balance sheet of some of these big AI companies.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I think even in the last week, NVIDIA have come out and said that they've now got a closed loop system which uses like a percentage of the water.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how many startups are solving the water problem for golf courses.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: So I I I I think I think all in all is like let's channel our energy in that space to where there's gonna be most bang for buck.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_03: And for me, that comes down to energy infrastructure and making sure that they're powered by the right forms of energy and they're sited in the right locations where they're gonna be least detrimental.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I so then the NAT held a really great conversation on data centers and nature specifically.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: And okay, so first, full disclosure, we were talking about AI use internally.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's important to us.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, AI is also a thread through a lot of the investments we're making, unsurprisingly.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: The new ones that we're doing and the old ones that we're doing that are now suddenly able to spin up a new prototype overnight.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what you could do with the small number of people for entrepreneurial folks trying to get a lot done.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's like nothing I've ever seen.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: 100% agree.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of limits and and you know, asterisks we can put in different places, but um incredible uh time.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think data centers are coming, right?
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we do spend a lot of time thinking about what does what's the opportunity around this from a nature perspective?
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I I come around to thinking there is a generational opportunity where you have hyperscalers who have constituents that are not particularly excited about some of the development in their backyard who need to do something that makes it more palatable.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: You have very real ecological concerns.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: I do agree that water is overstated.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, broadly speaking, it's real.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: But if we want to be serious about water use, I would, I would direct our energy toward cattle or or maybe golf courses, uh, or you know, where specifically we're citing where water is more abundant.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: But that's but some of the other ecological issues don't get talked about as much.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Noise pollution, you know, um visual blight, I think has been talked about.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um energy use, local heating impacts, right?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, like you're you're creating warmer environments around some of these.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think all of those need to be grappled with.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and one of the things that gets me excited is we do have a pretty good technology around green roofs that could help with some of this.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is there an opportunity to do something like biodiversity net gain, but around data centers, right?
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: Could you either offset that impact locally?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: Could you try to engineer the data centers to be more integrated into the environment so that you've got the cooling effects from nature around it?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you have people who are able to capitalize on this.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so but the last thing I will say on this is uh environmental concerns have historically sometimes been used to stop things that people don't want for other reasons.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's really important to look past what are people saying and what are they actually objecting to?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think in many cases, data centers are becoming this everything bagel of scapegoat, uh, where you know they are a proxy for wealth inequality.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're a proxy for job uncertainty.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: The tech companies are not helping themselves because they're talking about uh when they are laying off people because AI is helping them be more efficient, their stock price goes up.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, like there is a reason why people are upset about these things, and I think we need to grapple with that.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I also think from a nature perspective, we can do everything to make them um be a positive.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_06: So I I have a theory that the massive AI companies will become the biggest investors in real natural assets that's ever been because I think if they don't, they won't have the environmental or social license to operate.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_06: So whether they get a closed loop system on water or not, no one's gonna believe they've got one for like 10 years now because the the rumour and the tail of these things last forever.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_06: You know, you can see as many studies um as possible that wind turbines affect far fewer birds than domestic cats, and no one cares.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, exactly.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_06: Because they've fixed that point that the media's got it and it's and it's factual.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_06: So I had this philosophy that we're gonna get anthropic national parks or open AI national parks.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_06: I love that.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_06: We recorded with Troy Carter, who owns Earth Shot in in San Fran, and he's literally mapped it up, he's done some of these things, he said, we'll build these parks for you, we'll we'll do it for anthropic.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_06: And I ended up on a call with a member of the executive team at Apple who literally reports to Tim Cook.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_06: Can't say who.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and I put this theory to him and he said, We've had that discussion at the board.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_06: So it is happening.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_06: So they do know they are going to have to make investments in real assets.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_06: And if you pull the sort of business part of this logically, yeah, and you described it beautifully when you were like, effectively, all the businesses we're all working with are being disrupted by AI in one way, shape, or form.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_06: Even if it's only in their supply chain, they're being disrupted.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_06: So if you are open AI anthropic, where can you diversify to in terms of the huge amount of capital you're going to have flowing in every week that you're not disrupting?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_06: Well, real assets are the only thing you can put it in that you're not going to disrupt.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_06: So that closed loop of I can put it in a different asset class that is not affected by me, and I can secure social and environmental license.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_06: And in the US, if my understanding of this is right, they can even gift that to the state and have the tax benefits associated with it as well.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_06: And you would need such a cash flow to make that viable.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, lo and behold, they've got it.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_06: So somebody somewhere is going to be building national parks philanthropically almost, or certainly gifted eventually to make this possible.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_06: I just don't see any other way of it happening.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: The other piece that's beautiful about it is it's tangible.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: When you talk about when you talk about nature relative to climate, we think of these as being two sides of the same coin.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh signs that the way that we are living as a human civilization is out of balance with our our planet.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um climate is beautiful because it's relatively simple.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Carbon dioxide, uh, you send it up in one part of the world, you draw it down in another part of the world, it kind of maths out.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm sure someone would argue with me, but roughly you could compare a lot of different things.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Nature, so much more complicated.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: All the same things that make us love it make it really tricky.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: But the beautiful thing about it is you can see the difference in so little time, as you well know.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's it's tangible for people.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_03: Complex in the measurement and completely get that.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: There's no equivalent.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the equivalent of that one ton of carbon, slightly harder for people to get their heads around, but very simple in the fact that whoever you speak to, regards of regardless of kind of political persuasion, yeah, upbringing.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_03: No one's gonna argue with let's have clean water, let's have a biodivice walk that I can go on five minutes from my home.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_03: So, in that sense, it's very cross-cutting.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's part of our strength as a space as well, right?
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_06: So I do think the environment sector is very guilty of overcomplicating itself.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_06: So I I went to an event with B Zero Carbon, I think those guys doing some great stuff on Tuesday morning, and they convened and I mean it it was they convened an expert panel, okay, of government policy makers, insurers, regulators, carbon experts, and they were talking about the real nuts and bolts of how you categorize certain types of carbon credits and things.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_06: And and I had to leave quite early and was asked to sum up some thoughts.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_06: And I was like, can we just remember most people don't care?
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_06: Like really, they they don't, they would just like fewer emissions and they'd like to be doing more good things.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_06: And whether it's under this protocol or this one, most people don't care.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_06: We just need to simplify it a little bit.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_06: And I think you are right, there are certain fundamentals, clean rivers, access to the environment, a better world people can understand.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_06: That's changing as well, I think.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_06: Five years ago, the environment sector would tie itself in knots.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_06: You know, you you would get um so that the chief exec of the wildlife trust in the UK is a guy called Craig Bennett.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_06: Prior to him, a lot of the trusts wouldn't even talk to each other.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_06: They were like warring factions of, oh no, no, that's not invented here or it is there.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_06: And he's done a great job of bringing them together to actually agree that look, we have far more similarities than we do differences.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_06: And that's been an improvement that I think has come with business and professionals entering the sector as opposed to it being hobbyists.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_06: I guess the segue for me is you mentioned it about the the internet of things and the the unlock that might come.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_06: What does that make you most excited about in terms of nature tech?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_06: What are some of the things that you think this is coming now, this is possible where it wouldn't have been before?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: Something we've been pondering is there is we need to make sure that as a space we are proponents of uh using AI wherever we can.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: Because I I f my concern is if we get into uh if there's a subset of companies that decide not to use the technology or use it more sparsely because of the knock-on effects, because of the water usage, because of the emissions, there's almost certainly going to be a a bad co-equivalent that's gonna be using it full guns blazing.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_03: So we need to actually like I'm very passionate about the fact that we need AI fluency in the space to be going up and up and to the right.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um in terms of your question, what does it enable?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_03: I think it democratizes intelligence for and makes things simple for a lot of people that is a brilliant phrase.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: That agree that wants that that wouldn't have had it five years ago.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_03: So we were writing the start of this week.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: There's a farmer, Japanese farmer.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um he was uh bought a piece of land about five years ago, was previously in engineering, very limited kind of uh software experience.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_03: He's going out into the field and he's got five agents, but he he'll take a picture of his broccoli, he'll send it back to Claude and Gemini, they'll tell they'll give him diagnosis of exactly what's wrong with it.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_03: And he's not had to pay for an expensive subscription or expensive license.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: He's just doing it with an LLM for practical use cases that are very tailored to his farm.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's just one example.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_03: But I can see if we get AI adoption right in those communities, there's gonna be hundreds of examples just like that.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um and my hope is that that's gonna lead to more pro higher productivity, particularly in the agriculture sector, higher productivity, higher yield, and uh in a in a sector which has notoriously not had a lot of money to invest in this space.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what what's the fundamental problem we have, right?
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's that our nature is disconnected from our economic system.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's lots of different ways that it shows up subtly, but fundamentally it's deeply undervalued.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the things that is an emergent property of that is when you talk about supply chains, uh we have created these commodity products that are divorced from where they come from and what the ecological impacts of that are.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think one of the potential remedies for that is something that is 10 years ago wouldn't have been imaginable, which is the idea of being able to measure nature everywhere.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're not there yet.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's a lot of different concurrent technologies that are making it imaginable.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you're probably using all of them, right?
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: EDNA, acoustics, camera traps, uh satellite data that's getting more high resolution by the day.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so if you see that playing out, then suddenly that that product that you're getting from one corner of the world has uh provenance, right?
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have that, you can link that to real impact.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that gets me excited.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: On the the way that AI uh interfaces to that, I I completely agree with this, uh uh with what Ollie said here.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um one area that we're also watching is there is a temptation to have AI-based insights, but without properly ground truth data, right?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I don't think we've collected enough ecological data to get to high resolution, high accuracy conclusions.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think that is more what the market has appetite for right now.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so we're always on the lookout for someone who gets that balance right of good enough conclusions for whoever the decision maker is that isn't dramatically more onerous.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like I would never expect a company to pay for camera traps to be distributed throughout uh, you know, some portion of the Amazon uh for some reason, right?
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, what is that balance?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's gonna be a moving target as these tools get cheaper and more powerful.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_06: I wouldn't expect a company to pay for it, but it wouldn't surprise me if the OpenAI Foundation did.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_06: For example, think think about the potential discoveries they could bring in some kind of uh if if they collected the the widest, most dense spectrum of ecological data across the Amazon.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_06: And you would suddenly blink and five years later the commercial application of that understanding would be massive farmer or agriculture or whatever it can be.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: And there are some places where this is happening right now, right?
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um mining sites that have an obligation to remediate after they've they've done their work and uh they're moving on to the next place.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: If they don't remediate properly at the end of that mining process, and this varies from geography to geography.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some places don't care at all, unfortunately.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: But um, if they don't, they can't get to their next site, right?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it's existential for them to be able to show what the baseline is and what they've done over time.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're in a company called Spore, you talked about birds and offshore wind uh wind farms.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: Impacts have been grossly overstated.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they've built a camera that is monitoring offshore wind farms to detect every bird that goes past, every species, every direction, and they can tell you this is how many actually were taken by a turbine.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh companies will pay for this because it replaces an ornithologist that goes out once a year, makes an extrapolation from you know a day of field work, and this is going to be more accurate, persistent, um, and cost competitive, right?
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_06: Um, in in Scotland, um, similar change in how deer numbers are counted.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_06: So historically, it would have been a gamekeeper who understood a landscape who would go, well, this time of year, they usually over there will go look at a few.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_06: We think there's this many as well.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_06: Massive estimate, huge, plus or minus, bigger than the actual number itself was in terms of your range.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_06: Then they would go, okay, well, we might be able to use a helicopter now, big carbon footprint, incredibly expensive.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_06: Once every few years you would do it.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_06: Now, teams are doing it, and we do it in-house.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, a a almost a swarm of drones, not too many, uh working at the same time, so they're not double counting, multi-spectral analysis, so you get a photograph, you also get thermal, so you can see through vegetation layers, and you get really accurate deer counts.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_06: As a result of that, you can make a literal programmed approach to how you will manage those deer numbers on an estate, whereas before, you were just guessing, you had no idea what you were doing for.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I spent a lot of my academic career on game reserves or in uh knee deep in streams in the northeast of England.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, even 10 years ago, your your ability to uh monitor, particularly on game reserves, like anti-poaching, was incredibly manual.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was a plane up in the sky.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: If if the reserve was particularly well off, they'd have one drone, yeah.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_03: They'd have intelligence in the local village that about if if there were any poaching missions going to happen, and they have teams of poach uh anti-poaching teams, right?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: Now that the same reserves I were working on, they've got the the cost of hardware is so cheap that they they've got pretty much a continuous monitoring for with a set of drones and their ability to stop poaching missions is 10x.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_03: So there's there's kind of like you've got these use cases directly in conservation as well, right?
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I know you're you're a proponent of a lot of that with oxygen as well.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_06: We're literally continuously monitoring monitoring the water quality across every river in our states.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_06: Cool.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_06: Continuously monitoring have been doing since we bought.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: Anything surprising you found?
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_06: How uh I mean this is a far better question for our head of environment, Dan the Fish.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_06: Uh Dan the Fish.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_06: He's removed more weirs than anyone else in the UK for fish passage.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_06: Um, how rapidly you will see changes to uh river temperature based on the composition of the corridor?
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_06: So where trees have been lost from a catchment, you will get a river that's so much hotter than it should be where there is tree coverage.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_06: So we've done a lot of riparian tree planting to bring uh tree line back to the river banks and also reinstatement of woody debris in the channel and how quickly that responds.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_06: Um it wasn't an OC project, it was one Dan and I did before oxygen, but um, we did one of the biggest river restoration projects in the UK up in Staffordshire, and we took out what was a concrete lined 600-meter culver and restored it into a gravel bed river system.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_06: Fish spawned within 12 weeks of the gravels coming back.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_06: How did they know?
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_06: Like it had just been neat concrete beforehand, so that speed of recovery, you mentioned it earlier about nature bouncing batter.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_06: The one that I always think about that is we've got an estate in the Yorkshire Dales, a place called Swinley.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_06: And when I first went there, it it was as green as that cup because the amount of pesticides and chemicals on the hillside, and it was completely flat because it was sheep grazing in an inch of its life.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_06: Within a year, we'd we'd taken the sheep away, we'd stopped any form of pesticide, any form of chemical, let the land bounce back.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_06: All of a sudden, it's structurally all over the place in terms of growth and size and has roughed up.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_06: So structural diversity.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_06: And we we were there and my eyes were blurring.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_06: I was like, what on earth is that?
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_06: And the sheer number of voles that were running across, it took a moment to get your eyes in because they're so fast, but it was like tracks across in front of you.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_06: You go back another six months later, and there's owls hunting in broad daylight because it's an all-you-can-eat buffet, and this is the chapters of that environment coming back.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_06: It's the beauty because we've got 12 of these things now.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_06: I don't get to go to them all the time.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_06: So I get kind of three or six months' gaps when I go.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_06: So they've fundamentally changed each time I go back.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_06: That's cool.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_06: It is it's so incredible.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_06: Next time you come across, you should come and see him.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: You you introduced me to a term that I'm now using all the time last time we spoke, uh, which is re-wiggling rivers.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's Dan.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's all great.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: Is Lafish his birth last name?
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: And Johnson.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay, okay.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's still time.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: He could change it.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_06: Should we?
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_06: I think we should propose that he does.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_06: Um what's your what's what's super organism's timeline?
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_06: How long have you guys been around?
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: Great question.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I there's a simple answer, which is we launched in 2023.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the more complex answer is I worked in VC for the first eight years of my career, started being drawn to companies that were, for lack of a better word, weird, right?
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: They were working on biotech, which is how I met Kid originally.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: They were working on hardware, they were working on climate, they were working on food.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I was trying to figure out why I am being drawn to these weird companies that aren't just doing SaaS.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the the uniting factor for them was they were working on this challenge of how do we have more people and more nature?
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that became an obsession.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: I started thinking you could pick apart this problem, build a portfolio.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I went back to grad school, started angel investing.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: I met my partner Tom Quigley, who was insane enough to think this was a good idea too.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: He's wonderfully insane.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: I know, it's the best.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so critical on this journey.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, the importance of having the right partner for building a company um can't be overstated, um, at least for me.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh so we did this together and we then eventually found people who would support this mission.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're working with some really incredible folks.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we started investing together in 2021.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we did our final close on fund one, uh, announced that earlier this year.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: We now have a team of five.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so yeah, it's it's been a journey.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_06: They there's some there's something about whether it was COVID or whatever, there's something about that 2020, 2021 across the globe.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_06: So many companies in this space were popping up.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_06: Because it was formative for so many of us.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_06: How prevalent were deals available, availability of deals in 2021?
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_06: And how has that deal flow opportunity changed?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_06: Do you see way more than you did before?
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, we've got a pretty broad view of what is nature, right?
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because the truth of it is nature cuts across our entire economy.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: You want to look at most of the heaviest industries on the planet.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are opportunities to help them transition to greener practices, like solve core problems and do right on some of the extinction drivers that are actually causing this problem.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_06: Just on that, we had a lady called Katie Neck on the podcast yesterday.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_06: Um, she used to be head of sustainability at McLaren F1.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_06: She's now an ambassador for Anthropic.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, that's a tough act to follow.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_06: Amazing.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_06: She's a pretty amazing lady.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_06: And we had Elena Doms, our director of European as well.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_06: So I was just sat there with like notable celebrities.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_06: Of course.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and she talked about how they made a change from painting car parts when so McLaren went from being almost grey and silver to their traditional neon uh papaya orange colour.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_06: To make that change, they were gonna have to have custom paint made and things like that.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_06: And they pitched, why don't we use a vinyl wrap as opposed to paint?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_06: And it transpired that meant they could do it on track on site, which the race team's like, we get speed.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_06: The business team went, hold on, we don't have to fly parts back to the factory to paint them and bring them back out again.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_06: That saves us an absolute fortune.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_06: And she sat there going, Yeah, yeah, they're totally the reasons to do it.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_06: And the amount of carbon she saved as a result of not doing that, three-way win.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_06: So by making a choice on a technical element of the vehicle, helped in every which way.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_06: No one would have thought that would be um a victory in in the Formula One world, but it was a massive benefit for sustainability as well.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, 2021.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I left my old fund in 2018.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: Tom and I started working together in 2021, first met in 2019.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there being deals was a big part of convincing him that there was there was an opportunity here.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think there were plenty of companies that were talking about themselves as a climate company or an ag company or a biotech company, because there's there aren't there certainly weren't investors that were here for the biodiversity impacts of what you're doing.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they might say that's nice, that's cute, but you know, fundamentally, um, that's what we would come into a conversation saying.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he got to see with me um that this was a primary motivator for a lot of founders.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_01: They may have been speaking a different language, um, but they were really at the end of the day working on this same problem.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so for us, it became clear this is how they could share a thread line.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think now one of the biggest things that's changed is now being part of this bigger ecosystem.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: You've been part of it.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: Nature Tech Memos, by the way, one of the best resources out there.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: So definitely um shout out and you should check out everything they're doing.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's it's different, it's more mature.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: People will come out of the gate saying this is really what we're trying to do, um, which has been super fun to be a little part of.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_06: Have you have you tracked the stats on the decks that you receive and stuff like that?
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_06: Can you can you point to a trend line that it is more prevalent and you're seeing more of them?
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: That is a perfect use case for AI.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: We have not done that.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_06: Get it to go back and do it.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_06: I've now got homework historically for you.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_06: What what um you have a unique perspective on this, having like um documented a ton of it.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_06: How do you think we're seeing the the number, the range, the variety of deals change over that time frame?
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_03: So Kevin and I have a pretty similar view to what is nature tech, right?
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_03: So I think uh four or five years ago, a lot of people that were dubbing themselves as nature tech companies were probably mostly focused on measurement, reporting, verification, uh, and maybe a bit of nature risk.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh my my sense is there's that that is a critical part of the ecosystem, but there is also an equally critical part, which is working in extractive industries that's that's looking at making um uh some of those industries that have risk and dependency on nature uh operate in a more efficient and uh a more efficient way, effectively, um, and particularly around some of those kind of extinction drivers.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_03: So I think we've matured a lot in the volume of companies that would now class themselves as nature tech companies.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and and then I think secondly, the the other kind of counter trend is there was an explosion of companies, particularly in the MRV space or or the carbon dioxide removal space.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_03: So we've tracked those.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_03: About three or four years ago, there was around 500.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_03: That number's now around 350 to 400.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think we'll see more consolidation?
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I believe so, but I think that's a that's not a bad thing.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's a sign of our space maturing.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and we've also, you know, also diversifying into other forms of CDR.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it's it's ruffled some companies out that perhaps had built their business models around the wrong thing or the wrong value drivers for customers.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_06: We we had Dimitri from Ecology on the podcast, and he said exactly that.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_06: He said, I think we're entering the period of consolidation, which will um you're actually seeing it in the sort of natural capital developers and and operator space.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_06: So, like um Great Yellow, the company, have recently brought in some incredible talent from other teams as well.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_06: And you've also seen super teams form, rebalance Earth are doing some awesome stuff there as well, and restore and things.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_06: So I think there's so much talent across the sector.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_06: If you can bring that together into some super teams, that's it can only be even more exciting.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_06: Let's talk about what comes next.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_06: So you mentioned the MRV chapter.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_06: I think you're almost seeing those dominoes knock over, and we discover something else, and then and also 21, 22, 23, this was pre-AI.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_06: So, really, in terms of what's coming in to change the tech and the solutions are in the future, you know, we're only starting to look at robotics and automation and those type of things.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_06: What are you excited about, Mike?
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, turn up next.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, so many things.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: I got into this because I'm a nerd.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so we all are.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: In a safe space.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we try to come in with a ready mind, but we always want to be surprised.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the ready mind is what are the challenges that we would really love to see solutions to?
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, we'd love to see solutions to white-nosed fungus for bats.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to see something for kitrid.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to see uh something that is making green roofs more affordable, modular.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_01: I know nothing about the white-nosed fungus for bats.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh talk to me about that.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's disastrous.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's this fungal pathogen um that is decimating bat populations in the US.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we we've talked about wind farms and their impacts on birds being overstated.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, they're not overstated for bats.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and bats, for whatever reason, appear, we found this out in our diligence on spore.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: For whatever reason, can sometimes be drawn to some of the currents around wind farms.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so assuming that we continue to have ecological protections for some of these species, when you combine these things, these different factors with you know habitat loss and everything else, and you have a fungal pathogen that some species are relatively immune to resistant to, and others are really, really impacted by, um, you have a recipe for probably needing to list more bat species.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's going to in turn impact how you're developing wind farm, uh, wind farms.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um so uh, you know, and Kitrid is a similar pathogen, but it's impacting amphibians.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you turn that problem into a business?
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we recently made an investment in a company called Ditto Bio, uh, out of the new Y Combinator batch.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they are deriving uh trying to create new therapeutics out of insights from parasite biology.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because who's better at dodging the immune system than parasites and diseases?
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you can compare this species that's able to dodge it with this one, um, the uniting factor is our immune system.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_06: Um and when the marketing opportunity for that is an absolute dream.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, like I I just I just had like an emotional reaction to that.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_06: It's so wonderful to like map that out because the the storytelling on the romanticism is just beautiful.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_06: Oh nature's guide to how to do it.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, love it.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, we have a a very wildlife forward website, and just thinking about what's the what's the weird, disgusting parasite we're gonna put on there uh was was not why we invested, but it wasn't not why we invested.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, um when we were when we were diligencing that the way they build their business is humans and therapeutics for humans.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_01: But for us, uh, you know, their platform is fundamentally taking genetic code from one species, genetic code from another, finding where these line up uh with proteins that interact.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that fundamental logic could work for species that are non-humans.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they were really excited about being able to chase that, assuming job number one, which is build a really compelling, defensible business, happens.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_06: Do you let yourself get excited first by the concept and the idea and the problem to be solved, and then you test the business side of it?
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_06: Or does it vary on the opportunity?
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_01: You really have to evaluate what's in front of you.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my worst I've been in VC 15 years.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my worst mistakes have been letting myself get excited about an idea and not paying enough attention to the founder and specifically what they're telling me.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_06: That's gonna be my follow-up question.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_06: So, do you do you fall for the ideas rather than the founders?
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_01: I am more prone to that.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's tough.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_01: But for what gets me excited, I just think we have uh a blank slate of ways to imagine our world and a suite of technologies that are unlike anything else for being able to understand and engage with the natural world.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, we're we're spending a lot of time in robotics, a lot of time in biotech.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_03: So m my thought process, so day job working with some of the largest natural capital organizations globally.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um what are the mega trends that I'm seeing with day job, which early stage nature tech companies play into?
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and there's obviously loads of it, but effectively a lot of companies are looking at cheaper, more resilient, closer to home supply chains.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there is within those mega trends, there is a large number of companies that are either taking inspiration from nature um or are nature tech companies themselves to to play into those.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_03: So one example that I really like at the moment, Geno Mines.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_03: Effectively, uh there are huge dams of mine waste sitting across most of the Western world and globally.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_03: And basically, as waste, as mine waste is extracted, it will get pumped into these dams with a load of water, and it has just been sitting there.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's a huge liability for miners.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um but also it's a huge liability for communities that that live nearby.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_03: But because these were extracted 50 years ago and the technology was was so much less mature, there is a huge amount of untapped resources that are sitting in that mine waste.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_03: So, what Genome Mines does is it plants uh genetically modified plants that are by hyper bioaccumulators.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_03: So their sole goal of growing is that they will suck up as much uh copper or similar critical minerals from that mine waste as possible.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_03: And if you look back at those mega trends, so Genome Mines is taking inspiration from nature, but it's also benefiting nature because it's cleaning up those mine reserves.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a a source of near shore metals when governments around the world are looking for that.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_03: Uh it's reducing the liability that a lot of these miners have because they're they're not having to it actually helps with the stability of the mine waste as well.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm really excited about companies like that.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_03: And there's low, there's far more about now than there were five years ago that are really playing into those mega trends.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_03: So um when I'm looking at companies I'm most excited about, it's it's it's those kind of it's those kind of opportunities.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_06: Do you ever have those ideas that kind of stick in the back of your head and you're like, how is this not a business yet?
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_06: And it might not even be plausible, but you it's a thing that you think you could solve.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_06: We are we are surely going to be mining and asset stripping old landfill sites because of the accumulation of minerals and metals and uh things that can be reused again.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_06: And also, they're effectively creating bio leachate that could be used for energy anyway, which we're getting from other places.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_06: And a lot of in the this is in a UK context, um a lot of the landfill sites are in places that actually, if it wasn't a landfill, should be housing now because of where they are.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_06: And the technology is there to reclaim, recover, redistribute all those things.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_06: And then if you've got a brownfield site that you can redevelop, and there's an amazing company I used to work with called Sanctus, who have done this, they've filled in old mine workings, re-solidified the ground, completely cleared it up, and produced housing on those places because it's better land use.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_06: The economics of that are have so got, especially you can now have AI-led mechanical sorting of things as well.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_06: So it's not like you can use people with it.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_06: That's gotta come.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Especially for the people who have, you know, millions or billions of dollars in Bitcoin on a hard drive that they've accidentally.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_06: I know, right?
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's that's what you really do to incentivize it.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_06: That's the added bonus.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_06: Exactly.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_06: That is the added bonus of it.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_06: When how do you balance on the venture side of things, thinking about an opportunity when the biggest opportunities might be those that don't have a market fit already, but you need to manage the risk that, you know, Oli comes from a perspective of who the buyer is, where is the business argument is.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_06: How do you balance those two challenges?
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we come from that attitude too.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and we have to be really hard with ourselves because the reality is, you know, there's there's a couple other venture firms that really are nature focused.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's a broader aperture of people who will do some nature deals.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then it gets bigger if you think about who's doing ag tech, who's doing oceans, who's doing climate.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but for nature specifically, there is still a few, only a few of you, right?
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a small number.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, uh us, Sand River, Systemics, Rulean does a bunch, pale blue dot.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: On the later state side, just climate.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's not a big pool, right?
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we're thinking about an investment, we have to assume that the next investor coming, because that's we're very early stage, uh, is not going to have nature front and center.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this comp, whatever company we're backing, needs to have a case that is compelling enough just on its business merits alone, that hypothetically a generalist would come in.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that means that we end up, I'd say, being pretty hard on businesses where the only way that you could see a potential billion dollar plus outcome is through if we assume biodiversity credits are coming.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think long-term, no reason in my mind not to think that.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Many of our companies will benefit if and when they do, but they need to solve a really core problem now.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, for example, our company Funga.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Funga is rewilding soils to accelerate tree growth.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the core problem they're solving for carbon developers is this is additional carbon growth.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, trees grow 30 to 60 percent faster when they're grown in biodiverse soils.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the land partners they're working with get healthier, longer-lived, faster growing trees that are saleable product that go into the built environment.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so solving real discernible problems today uh with the world as it is today.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um if you can't talk about your value proposition to a buyer without speaking without speaking about nature, it's gonna be tough.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_05: That's interesting.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and side note, I hope that changes with time.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_01: But that's that's how we're playing uh in this early world.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_06: So um one panel I chaired this week, a hand came up from the floor, a really passionate young guy talking about how he'd just got back from Kenya and they'd gone from severe drought into catastrophic flood, and people needed to be doing more about that, and and surely people should be investing in that.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_06: And I had to explain the words you've just used are reasons why people won't invest.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_06: I know emotionally they're pulling on your heartstrings, but you've just told someone it's incredibly high risk, it's unpredictable, and you're dealing with significant natural disaster areas.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_06: They're all reasons why sophisticated capital are going to say, not for me, thanks.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_06: So do you end up so for I kind of figure there might be a scenario where for a company to excite you and to get you, they are talking about different and novel and new and exciting.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_06: But for their next exit, they're like, oh no, no, this is developed and steady and stable.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_06: And so do you have to help them transition the language or are they still able to keep with the excitement and the novelty as being a feature, not a risk?
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Forgive the expression, but inside of me there are two wolves.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And one of those wolves is my nerdy conservation biology background side that always tries to have that ready mind.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_01: The other side is, you know, a VC.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And a VC also has to be uh a good VC, in my opinion, has to live at this balance between being optimistic and skeptical.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you always want to fall in love, you always want to see the vision, you always you can't do this if you can't see future possible worlds.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: But you also have to be really hard uh on on how real is the evidence.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how could this show up?
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's a little bit of how I think about it.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_06: Penny, are you thinking about the thumbnail with him having like a split wolf face?
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I will love that.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've gotten two wolf watching swords this year.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_04: That is that is brilliant.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_04: I love it.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_04: I love it, I love it, I love it.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um how would over time I'm good, I'm good, are we good?
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, awesome.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_04: We covered everything we wanted to do.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as I walk my leg I'll be asleep, but that'll be fine.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_01: I get not a doctor.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_01: When do you head home?
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_01: I go home early Saturday.
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I'm not sure.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you're saying you hate me.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_01: You're saying what we do and things are uh no, uh maybe.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_06: You're very busy.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_06: You weren't just totally chilling this week.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_06: You're like not getting carried away with it.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, uh I'm I'm trying to focus on what we're building as well.
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_03: So where's I'm I'm trying to be like, where's the best hour of of my day spent?
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not yeah, it's coming.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_03: No, it is.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_03: It is, it definitely is.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, you could have just said no.
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_06: You could have just said no.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_06: That would have been less offensive.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'm coming.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_03: Kevin, Kevin knows.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_03: I've been to a lot of uh super organism events.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're sick of them.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, you're the best part of coming.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, thank you.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_05: Um, is there much is there much left to do Friday?
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_05: Is there still stuff going on?
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Some friends of mine are going to be bringing together some nature technology people up near Cambridge.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the pitch is it's going to be in the field and there will be a fire.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how the fire is gonna feel on a 90 degree day, or excuse me, like a 37-degree day, but yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_05: That's interesting.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_06: What does what does a good exit out of London Climate Week for you look like getting ready for New York?
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_06: Because that's the next aim point, right?
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_03: So hoping to be in New York, like I think uh you spoke earlier about the different theme thematics of of each climate week.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_03: Sam Fran was AI, I think New York was capital.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_03: I I I'm really interested in how we transplant some of that, uh, some of those American words, the capital and the and the AI innovation, to to the UK.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_03: So I think for me, New York will be all about learning.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um learning about that capital, like the capital conversation and how we bring some of that back to the UK.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_06: We're we're gonna so I love the theatre podcast, right?
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_06: This is very cool, seeing you both.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_06: It's great.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_06: The theatre was fucking cool.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_06: It's like 200 people in the room as well.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_06: We're gonna do it in New York as well.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_06: Find a theatre.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_06: Cool.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_06: I think we should do a UK showcase.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_06: We should do a panel and say, look, we we are coming to tell you what we're doing in the UK and the approach to presenting it.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_06: Can you do that with like tea and a little sapphire?
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_06: A little phone booths and regards.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_03: I think it'd be interesting to hear your take on this, Kevin.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_03: But I think naturally as a culture, we have a bit of tall poppy syndrome.
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um what does tall poppy syndrome mean?
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_03: So I think in the UK, our tolerance for risk, or if you're down the pub and you're talking about your new idea, I think there's a tendency for us as a culture to kind of be like, oh, that sounds different.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_03: Are you sure?
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas you go, I I just spent a month in New York, and everyone there, if you if you talk about an idea, is like that is the best idea I've ever heard.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_03: And everyone's got their own little thing.
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I think if we were able to transplant more of that back to the UK, we'd we'd have it would be incredibly beneficial for our innovation ecosystem.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm I live in New York now, but I'm from San Francisco.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And San Francisco, especially, one of the things you just learned being part of that culture is you genuinely don't know who's going to wind up being wildly successful.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that, you know, in some cases can lead to big amounts of meat ego.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_01: But in others, it I think the truer form of this is it leads to a certain humility, right?
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_01: People show up, they have a glit in their eye, they have something they want to do, and you take them seriously because you learn you need to take people seriously.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_06: In the UK, if you try something and it fails, you are viewed as an abject failure, you're done, forget about it, whether that's sport, business, or anything.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_06: The only person sort of of the sort of British investment institution I've seen invert this is a guy called Jonathan Diggs.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_06: Up until recently, he was the chief investment officer at Octopus.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_06: So the the fund structure, not the energy company, although they were the backers of the energy company.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_06: And Jonathan always used to look for someone who had founded something and tried and moved on.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_06: And it meant he found a plethora of talent.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_06: Because everyone else would be like, oh no, no, they've they failed something, you can't possibly use it.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_06: And Joshua's like, nope, they learnt a lot and they know what good looks like now.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_06: So shout out to to JD, he'll be on the podcast soon.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a knock-on impact too of if someone hasn't experienced failure before, it means there's statistically a high probability that whatever startup someone is doing will.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, when when you've got something that's so intertwined with your persona, how you see yourself, uh, how you show up, what you're telling everyone in your life you're doing, and that fails.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_01: You haven't experienced that before.
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_01: I I've seen it lead to some dark places for people.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_01: It could be tough.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so uh yeah, I I agree with that.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_03: So we need to celebrate failure more as a society, I think.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_06: How do you do that personally?
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_06: Well, you would have had to fail before.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_06: So he's debating whether to tell a particular story and see it going through his eyes.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Well, like failure doesn't have to be a grind sweeping uh you've started a venture and it hasn't worked.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_03: I think all learning is from micro failures, right?
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_03: So you can have some pretty big ones.
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, of course, of course you can, right?
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_03: But like uh, you know, at at the kind of micro scale, an A-B test is a a winner or fail.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, part of our ethos with the newsletter is how how many A B tests can we run in a monthly period?
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_03: So we're we're micro failing all the time, but I maybe not some macro fails.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_06: I would say I abjectly failed leading in the public sector because they just didn't want my approach, they didn't want innovation or excitement or enthusiasm.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_06: They wanted slow, steady, don't change anything, don't try and do anything different.
• 1:23:54
  SPEAKER_06: And that was just a fundamental cultural misalignment.
• 1:23:57
  SPEAKER_06: It just didn't work.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_06: And this was right at the start of my career, my my first ever proper job.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_06: And that and I I felt like a failure because I didn't achieve the changes I wanted, I didn't achieve the impact I wanted.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_06: I had a team of 500 people, I had a 100 million pound budget, and I did nothing of value.
• 1:24:12
  SPEAKER_06: And and I carried that for a year afterwards into the next chapter of my career and learned things and ultimately overcorrected some stuff and took away some of the excitement and the creativity that actually, by the time I went through that next chapter and arrived back at OC, I was like, uh to start OC, I was like, all right, no, no, no.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_06: Those things were fundamental elements that were important.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_06: I was just applying them in the wrong place.
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_06: So actually, the the values, the principles, the fact that you know, we have the most open, like the team knows everything about our business.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_06: We are completely transparent because I think if you want people to make great decisions and grow, they need to know stuff.
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_06: And you know, people would say, well, you can't possibly do that when you're 10 people or 20 people.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_06: Well, we do it at 50.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_06: So yes, you can, but it took failing in one context to apply it in another for me to do that.
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_06: Um, I think we do all need to fail more.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_06: And maybe the thing we can all do is make it easier for those around us to get things wrong.
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_03: Really simple message that uh I've seen reverberated a lot recently is if your friends like the best thing you can do to support a friend when you start something, just go and buy what they're selling.
• 1:25:18
  SPEAKER_06: Oh my god, and not ask for something free.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_06: Like, so um we we had someone was uh was very kindly trying to like um give us free stuff to put.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_06: I was like, no, no, I just want to pay for it.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_06: Like I want to support you in terms of what you're doing.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_06: I think that's a realization.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_06: That's an American UK thing.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_06: Like I think in America you you would support your entrepreneurial friend more in that regard.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, but within reason.
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_03: I don't have a I don't think I have much need for like a farming, a farming drone.
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_03: Tiny London.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_03: I just don't know.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I just I just don't think you've been you've been creative.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_06: Um what I and I don't know if we caught this on camera before we started rolling.
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_06: Like we were asking each other about uh calendars and to-do lists and productivity systems, and I love what where can we get one or two percent of improvement anywhere in terms of our systems?
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_06: I love that about founders and and people in our space.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_06: Are you seeing the founders that are presenting new concepts and ideas to you now being fundamentally different in their ways of working because of AI and because of tools and tech?
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_06: Is it changing yet or is that yet to come?
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's absolutely changing.
• 1:26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think the balance that is fun to watch is what do people put the human touch on and what are they not?
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think there are certain touch points that should stay human driven, right?
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_01: I maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like I can tell when something is written by AI.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's not this, it's this.
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is the insight, this is the unlock, whatever you want to talk about.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's not X, it's Y.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and when it comes to things like investor updates, they're not hard to write.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_01: And what I want out of that is not just the rundown of what's going on in the company, it's what are your reflections as leader of this company?
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're automating that, then you see it as a checkbox and not like what this is, which is building trust with your investors, showing how you are operating, um, and really being a party to how you're running this business.
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but in terms of the the minutia of running a company, our founder should be using AI.
• 1:27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's lots of different things that are uh bullshit time sucks that uh they should be dinking around with and figuring out how to turn that into an expertise.
• 1:27:35
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I agree.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_03: I was doing the mental math then.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we've we've put out probably five thousand pieces of cont individual content in the last three years.
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um and therefore I think I'm a pretty good spot of when content's AI generated and when it's not.
• 1:27:56
  SPEAKER_03: And I think as a technology, it amplifies Good taste just as much as it amplifies bad taste.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's a multiplier.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_03: So there is an incredible and increasing volume of slot, particularly in communications, but there is also therefore someone who has lived and breathed in industry and who is clearly keeping that human element to the important communications really stands out and is differentiated.
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_03: So you know, I agree with what you're saying.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_03: Use it, use it for the pipes, use it for certain pieces of content, yes.
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_03: But for communications with an investor, communications with a customer, actually putting really insight-driven newsletters or posts out on LinkedIn, keep the human in the loop.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_03: Because that's so obvious.
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_01: We're getting back to email now.
• 1:28:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm very old school on email.
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm fine with some automated elements.
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I write this piece all the time, just like copy paste that in, whatever, that's fine.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_01: But what the one thing that we don't have uh that hasn't changed is the amount of human time and energy that goes into this, right?
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I I think it is important to put in that effort and that time for a number of different interactions.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_03: There's always there's always counter trends, right?
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you know, in a world where it's increasingly easy to produce content at volume, there is going to be a spike for things that can't be replicated by that, and also in-person experiences as well, right?
• 1:29:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 1:29:33
  SPEAKER_06: I was thinking about that when you were speaking earlier.
• 1:29:35
  SPEAKER_06: That so right now, I think it's easy for us to think everyone's on the same spot of the AI wave.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_06: They are not.
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_06: All you need to I I speak to like extended family members and things, and what is this AI?
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_06: And they're not touching a thing.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_06: So I I saw something about 8% of the UK has a subscription of some kind to AI.
• 1:29:57
  SPEAKER_06: And it was like, oh my god.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_06: I because everyone we talk to in the bubble that we work in is.
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_06: I'm surprised it's that high, honestly.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_06: Interesting.
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_06: I I wonder what it is in the US.
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_06: Probably comparable.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_06: Um, we will get, give it five years.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_06: That'll be 90%.
• 1:30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Is that a paid subscription or any subscription?
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Paid, I think.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Paid, I think.
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can get so much on the free version.
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_06: I think we'll end up with we'll see the logos uh human-made or made with a and there'll be people who will you like you get the Instagram influencers who are hand-making wooden tables and making thousands because it's bespoke.
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_06: You will get no AI has touched this at all.
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_06: This is completely but the equivalent of organic food, and there'll be a premium for that once things have moved that far the other way.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Ads that are performatively showing this was handcrafted.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: This took a lot of effort, and that as being a luxury signal, right?
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, I I think that makes sense.
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing is like getting back to time is fixed for every single person that we work with.
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_01: We all have the same amount.
• 1:30:58
  SPEAKER_01: When it is so easy to produce so much content, it is also uh that much harder to consume it.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I I do think there's gonna be value to putting the actual effort in, making it quality, people will follow that, right?
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_06: It's why um so I I write every week or multiple times a week, kind of in our newsletter, but it's why the books are still published.
• 1:31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:31:21
  SPEAKER_06: Because and I don't intend to sell any, but I like being able to to give someone a copy of the book and and the fact that it's there.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_06: And um, it is the biggest thrill when you see it in real life.
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah you're rocking around and someone who you don't know is sat right, it's like, oh my god, that is super cool.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_06: It's a real physical thing as well.
• 1:31:39
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm as big a data geek as you can get, but there is a place for both.
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_06: There totally is.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and hopefully you sell millions of copies of this book, but also what a leveraged thing if like one person reads this and changes their whole life.
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_06: It what you were talking before about the people who reach out and ask for career advice.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_06: The the biggest loop of a weird emotional experiences is when we've and this week we've had a mad amount of people who have stopped us and like thanked us for inspiring them to want to get into the sector and things like that, which is lovely and is the most amazing thing.
• 1:32:12
  SPEAKER_06: Then often it pivots to what would it take to get a job with you guys?
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_06: And it's like I you just can't hire everyone.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_06: There's just not room for everyone, and you have to go, oh, I'm sorry, I don't think this is gonna work or what have you.
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_06: And I guess that's the privilege of of building something that people want to be part of.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_06: But it does suck having to say no all the time.
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_06: There's just more opportunities coming in the sector, though.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_06: So whether it's with us or or not, there are more jobs ever before in the in the space.
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my general advice is we're early.
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, maybe nothing ends up happening here and the world is all gonna burn and we're all doomed.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not my my attitude or belief.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh assuming that there is a world where we're valuing nature more, where there are more technologies to work with that, you know, there's like I said, not very many VCs like us.
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a handful of nature tech companies, hardcore nature tech companies that are out there.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, don't assume that there is going to be a job waiting for you and have a long arc on this.
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Think about the skills that you could develop and think about different chapters that lead to the same conclusion, right?
• 1:33:17
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of going direct line, this is the job Taylor made for me, uh, work in the field, work in conservation, or uh work inside of uh another startup that has no nature element.
• 1:33:27
  SPEAKER_06: My jobs didn't exist.
• 1:33:28
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, totally.
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_06: Each of the things we respectively do, yeah.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, appreciating we all wear several hats, are things that we've created in some way, shape, or form.
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_06: That's gonna happen tenfold now because people have tools we didn't have when we tried to create these things.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_03: And adaptability is king now.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, it's a trope, but being incredibly AI fluent and being dynamic and being able to be in a career for 18 months that may get displaced and pivot all of that skill set and the toolbox that you've got to This is the longest I've ever done anything.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_06: Really?
• 1:34:03
  SPEAKER_06: And we've done OC for five years.
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:34:05
  SPEAKER_06: Before that, each chapter was like three years or less.
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_06: Even back to grad school was like three years.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_06: So yeah, well, and and actually, I can't even argue this has been the same thing for five years because starting with the two of us, three to fifty people, it's a completely different business every three months.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_05: So interesting.
• 1:34:22
  SPEAKER_06: Um where are you on the overall impacts of AI and tech on the jobs?
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_06: More, less, different.
• 1:34:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you're looking at me.
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I do think that there is reason why people are concerned.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we need to be engaging with this more.
• 1:34:42
  SPEAKER_01: The nature of what jobs are going to exist and why we're paying people to do certain things, I think could shift.
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um whether how close we are to that reality um is certainly more than I would have expected five, 10 years ago.
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's already showing up on the margins in different places.
• 1:34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the nature of the history of automation is usually there's some sort of a downturn, some sort of a market pressure forcing function, and people realize they can get by with less than they had.
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's, I think, probably how this shakes out.
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_01: And what I don't know is, you know, in in the US, uh a good chunk of what fueled Trump's rise was uh the displacement of blue-collar workers.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder what's going to happen when we have that with white-collar workers.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh, you know, that's that's the dark side of what we're seeing.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_01: The bright side is, you know, if you have an idea, if you have anything, whether it's a business or whether it's creative, uh, the tools at your disposal, unreal.
• 1:35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that creative burst I'm also excited about.
• 1:35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I do wish we were having more serious conversations about what comes next.
• 1:35:47
  SPEAKER_01: And is this the an opportunity for a new form of social contract, right?
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_05: Interesting.
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm my day job as one of those affected sectors, right?
• 1:35:58
  SPEAKER_03: As a white white collar in in some regards, I think are the roles that a junior once would have done more scarce, I think possibly, because there are elements of that analysis that AI can do with a partner leading it, to 70 to 80% of have done.
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_03: But there's certain things that there will absolutely need to be a pipeline into those industries of people who are AI fluent, who are actually shaping those systems, who are going to be the next partners in those organizations.
• 1:36:36
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it's about skill set and what you're upskilling in uh as a junior entering the workforce.
• 1:36:43
  SPEAKER_03: And then I think you know, on a on a second point, what it goes back to our previous conversation.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_03: In that world where intelligence is more democratized, what companies are going to be differentiated?
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_03: And it's I think there's there's probably three things.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_03: The ones who have built huge trust, both through distribution of content but also through uh long-term in-person relationships.
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think secondly, it is uh outcomes.
• 1:37:15
  SPEAKER_03: Like you can't one of the days where you can sell a report or sell a piece of intelligence, you need to sell an outcome that is having an impact on a on your customer's PL.
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then and then third, I think it's dynamism, right?
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_03: You you need to have the ability to spin up a product or a new business with the understanding that in a year or two that revenue may disappear, but because you're quick enough to spin them up and spin them down, you're more resilient.
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we're continuing to touch on the human element.
• 1:37:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's a reason why when Tom and I got far enough along in our fundraise, the very first person we hired on the team was Kit.
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, she heads the ecosystem for us, how we interact with our portfolio, what we do for them, how we show up for the nature tech ecosystem.
• 1:38:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of this boils down to people.
• 1:38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:38:06
  SPEAKER_01: What you just talked about uh is one of the things that I'm so grateful for in this sector is no one has one career path into it.
• 1:38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, everyone's just kind of figured it out.
• 1:38:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's small enough where you can know different people.
• 1:38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we talk about going back to what do I hope to get out of London Climate Week and set up for New York Climate Week?
• 1:38:25
  SPEAKER_01: We talk a lot about lines, not dots.
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_01: How do we make sure that an interaction isn't just one point in time, because you only get so much.
• 1:38:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's just how do you build trust?
• 1:38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're not trying to just have superorganisms succeed.
• 1:38:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're trying to help this whole category succeed.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and we have a lot of fellow travelers in that.
• 1:38:43
  SPEAKER_01: And to the the analyst point, we we also just brought on Annie and Everett on our team.
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we're now a team of five.
• 1:38:49
  SPEAKER_01: We're not at 50 yet.
• 1:38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's God, I can't imagine what that would look like.
• 1:38:54
  SPEAKER_06: But um, I I I maybe month 30.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_06: Maybe month 30, and now and now 50.
• 1:39:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, five people broke so many things internally.
• 1:39:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was great.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but Annie and Everett, uh, you know, like there's there's a story that the the early stage VC careers, you know, you're you're kind of uh memo monkeys, so to speak.
• 1:39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that's not really what the role is, right?
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_01: The role is getting out there, the role is building trust, the role is using your judgment on, I believe in this or this.
• 1:39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like those human elements I think are really difficult.
• 1:39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and every opportunity to emphasize that in your career, I would, I would encourage.
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_05: Agree.
• 1:39:32
  SPEAKER_06: I I love that you you sort of called out the spirit and the the feel of the sector now.
• 1:39:37
  SPEAKER_06: And I think that's probably gonna be one of my key themes coming out of this climate week.
• 1:39:42
  SPEAKER_06: It is just a privilege to be in this space with you guys and so many other brilliant people.
• 1:39:47
  SPEAKER_06: And five years ago, it was pretty lonely.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_06: It was pretty lonely.
• 1:39:50
  SPEAKER_06: People were angry, sad, dismissive about the fact this was ever gonna come.
• 1:39:54
  SPEAKER_06: You were I was called mad way more then than I am now.
• 1:39:59
  SPEAKER_06: And the stuff I'm saying now is way madder.
• 1:40:02
  SPEAKER_06: But people believe it now.
• 1:40:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, starting a biodiversity focused VC, uh, I would talk with conservationist friends and they'd be like, money.
• 1:40:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and I'd talk with my venture capitalist friends and they'd be like, you mean like climate?
• 1:40:15
  SPEAKER_01: And no, no, no, weirder.
• 1:40:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I I feel like there's a lot more teammates on this, you know.
• 1:40:22
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:40:22
  SPEAKER_06: And and the I've never it it that's the that's the word team.
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_06: And the environment sector in the UK five plus years ago wasn't like that.
• 1:40:30
  SPEAKER_06: And you mentioned it about the different routes of people coming in.
• 1:40:33
  SPEAKER_06: Uh as bizarre as it might sound.
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_06: Have you met Rob Gardner, who um he has rebalance earth?
• 1:40:39
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yep.
• 1:40:41
  SPEAKER_06: He's been one of the most impactful people on the environment sector because he came from a pure pension fund side.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_06: Cool.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_06: But but it just meant the language, the terminology, the way of working, the need to collaborate was way different.
• 1:40:54
  SPEAKER_06: And Rob, Rob's been in sort of similar time frame to us now, but that just influx of genuine cognitive diversity and different experiences have made this sector just wonderful.
• 1:41:05
  SPEAKER_06: And that feels like a perfect way to call time on our podcast.
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_06: Guys, thank you for making time in what is a mad week for you and a relaxing week for you, by all accounts.
• 1:41:14
  SPEAKER_06: Um I don't believe it.
• 1:41:16
  SPEAKER_06: I think we, if you do get across to New York, we should do a UK showcase of what we can share from um what we're doing and learning and developing.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_06: And hopefully, Environment Bank are gonna be across and get a few of the others as well and really showcase what we're doing.
• 1:41:30
  SPEAKER_06: And yeah, I guess my final question with you how do we plan the best New York Climate Week?
• 1:41:34
  SPEAKER_06: So we're gonna come across.
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_06: How do we make sure as we flip the script, we make the most of coming across?
• 1:41:39
  SPEAKER_06: What's your advice?
• 1:41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Great question.
• 1:41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, similar to what you're doing with Blended Climate Week.
• 1:41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to the people that you want to be seeing, if not collaborating with, yeah.
• 1:41:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:41:50
  SPEAKER_01: And understand what they're working on.
• 1:41:52
  SPEAKER_01: Try to figure out where there are gaps in the schedule, try to think about what hasn't been done in the schedule if you can.
• 1:41:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and do an event that includes alliteration, because they're the best ones.
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, obviously.
• 1:42:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you could fit a pun in there even better.
• 1:42:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, I would do all of that.
• 1:42:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then make space for serendipity, right?
• 1:42:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you have such a regimented program schedule, you miss out on the opportunity to meet people.
• 1:42:18
  SPEAKER_06: Have you heard of the Walking Softer Foundation?
• 1:42:21
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:42:21
  SPEAKER_06: So we got invited through a friend of a friend to an event with them at the ice cream museum in New York.
• 1:42:27
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, fun.
• 1:42:28
  SPEAKER_06: Do you know what that place is?
• 1:42:29
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, it's a tourist trap, but yes.
• 1:42:32
  SPEAKER_06: So they close the whole place down, other than for this event.
• 1:42:35
  SPEAKER_06: This is like a four or five floor Willy Wonka-esque ice cream thing.
• 1:42:41
  SPEAKER_06: Build for Instagram.
• 1:42:42
  SPEAKER_06: It's insanity.
• 1:42:44
  SPEAKER_06: Like there's like floor-to-ceiling metal slides throughout this thing.
• 1:42:48
  SPEAKER_06: There's a room that's just full of bananas hanging from the Well, you need that.
• 1:42:52
  SPEAKER_06: It's like you're having a fish.
• 1:42:53
  SPEAKER_06: Do you not have one?
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_06: No.
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_06: No.
• 1:42:56
  SPEAKER_06: So we hadn't slept.
• 1:42:57
  SPEAKER_01: The banana parlor is the most important part of my house.
• 1:43:01
  SPEAKER_06: We're jet lagged.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_06: We're in this thing late at night after being at a whole series of really serious events all day.
• 1:43:06
  SPEAKER_06: Someone hands you an ice cream cone, you're like, this is the most serendipitous moment ever in the history of the world.
• 1:43:13
  SPEAKER_06: It's just totally bizarre.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_06: But you're absolutely right.
• 1:43:15
  SPEAKER_06: Make time and space for the bizarre moments.
• 1:43:18
  SPEAKER_06: And also, the bit we would say is yes, meet the people.
• 1:43:21
  SPEAKER_06: Try and engage with the city a little bit if you're there.
• 1:43:23
  SPEAKER_06: Like we try and go to a sports fixture or it go and do go have afternoon tea in London.
• 1:43:28
  SPEAKER_06: Go to the natural history museum.
• 1:43:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the best in the world.
• 1:43:31
  SPEAKER_06: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:43:32
  SPEAKER_06: Guys, I've taken up far too much of your time.
• 1:43:34
  SPEAKER_06: That's been an absolute privilege.
• 1:43:35
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you so much.
• 1:43:36
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you.
• 1:43:36
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you.