Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
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Another ClimateTech Podcast
A founder's journey to climatetech investing, with me, Ryan Grant Little
This inverview is the 25th and final episode of my podcast Sound Funding, where I've been interviewing impact fund managers together with Impact Europe since 2020. If you're interested in impact funds, I highly recommend checking out the back catalogue!
Impact Europe's podcast host Benjamin DeVries interviewed me about my background as a founder, how I became a climatetech investor, why I started podcasting, and what I think about McKinsey (👎) and spicy chicken wings (👍).
Check out the back catalogue of my interviews with impact fund managers at Sound Funding.
Promo partner for this episode is Grizzle, helping B2B ClimateTech companies generate demand and customers through high-quality content, social media, and SEO services. Podcast listeners can book a free consultation here.
Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. You probably don't know this, but for the last couple of years I've been interviewing Impact Fund Managers on another podcast called Sound Funding. I've just wrapped up the series of 25 episodes and in this final episode, ben De Vries of Impact Europe interviews yours truly. Here's the episode. I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2:Ryan, welcome. Can you start out by taking us through some of the many hats you wear?
Speaker 1:First of all, thanks a lot for having me here. It's fun to be a guest on an EVPA or Impact Europe now podcast, so thanks a lot and I'm glad to be here. Yeah, I do wear a number of different hats and I have kind of over the course of my lifetime. I guess if I had to choose one, even though I'm not doing this right now I would call myself a founder. When I was a teenager, I founded an e-commerce company that I sold. We had a small exit around well 1999. And then from there I started a nonprofit, a public foundation in Canada, called Fittingly Canada Helps, and that's grown substantially. It's now 23, four years old and has processed over $3 billion for Canadian charities. So in some ways it's my unicorn, but it's a nonprofit. So like oops, and I funded that kind of at the beginning with all the money that I made from the exit.
Speaker 1:And then after then I did some university and I started a renewable energy company in the biogas space which I ran for a number of years, and when we exited that, I moved in 2010 to Berlin and started working on my own and also then with the BMW Foundation, like the car company, working to help European social entrepreneurs, help set up the nascent European impact investing space, as much as I kind of could, and so that kind of got me into my second role, which is helping impact companies and impact investors to match funding, to get more funding, to do kind of everything that we can to use financial markets or entrepreneurship and business to deliver on impact missions, and so that can all fall into a bucket called consultant, I guess, in which is what I do a lot of right now, which I don't think it ever kind of really matches what the work is, but it's connecting and it's working on projects, it's kicking things off and that type of thing. So that's the kind of catch all. I also am an investor and personally I focus on really early stage companies that generally are in the alternative proteins or alternative materials space, because for me it's about removing animals from the supply chain. I'm an animal lover, and so this is it's climate tech as well, of course, but that's for me the focus. I've invested in about 27 companies that fit that bill and then, with some of some climate tech funds that I help out with more broadly, kind of climate tech stuff.
Speaker 1:And then lastly, but probably most importantly for me right now, over these past two years as a volunteer working to help in Ukraine. At first it was largely about helping with the refugee crisis and then, after the last year and a half, it's been more and more helping with the military in whatever ways I can, bringing gear to them, buying up SUVs, that type of thing, and it's my little drop in the bucket, I guess, of doing my bit to try to prevent World War III, which I say jokingly but also I definitely think is, if you're an impact, you should be doing something about this developing and problematic situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, jokingly, but seriously as well. Wow, I mean, I feel like there's so much to get through with all of those hats, but if you had to and I recognize that each of them would have its own real spark of inspiration behind it but would you take us through just one thing that inspired you to go in one of those directions?
Speaker 1:Well, the easiest, you know, aside from the war starting the full-scale invasion starting in Ukraine, which is kind of a moment a day.
Speaker 1:If I think of my investment thesis in for alternative proteins, my impact investment thesis, I can very clearly draw a straight line to the person who opened that world up to me, and that's Bruce Friedrich, who is the founder and president of the Good Food Institute, based in Washington, and he's someone who I think just gets it in terms of you know, he can understand macroeconomics but also very closely understands human behavior and all these kinds of things, and so it has built this organization that spans all continents and I think is doing some of the most interesting work to support the burgeoning alternative proteins and alternative materials industries. And I had the good fortune of being able to finally interview him on my podcast and to thank him for being that influence on me, and so he's somebody who really understands that to improve human, animal and ecological welfare you have to make things cheap, easy and accessible, and so that's kind of a thesis that aligns with sort of my more practical side, is something I can get behind.
Speaker 2:So Bruce would be my number one inspiration for that, yeah, and I had the good fortune of listening to that episode in fact, oh cool. And I think it's an excellent entry point to what you're doing with your podcast. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of that, what got you into podcasting just as a format?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. So it's not that I said one day I want to be a podcast host. It's more because, working in the space for so long, there are so many people doing the most important and interesting work out there and nobody knows their names and nobody knows their stories. And meanwhile we have how many thousands of podcasts that are all about tech founders and stuff like that, and we celebrate these people because they made a billion dollars and if you stop and ask, what did they actually contribute to the world? Maybe they made you buy more stuff that you don't need, or they improved your efficiency at work by 5% or something like that.
Speaker 1:I mean, fair enough, but it felt over-weighted to really just celebrating this pure tech founder kind of thing. And meanwhile, all these great people so many scientists and activists and academics and founders that are doing important work and so I wanted to tell their stories. And in the case of sound funding, there are so many people who are funding this kind of work who are just very much in the background. Unless you're in the space, you would never know their names, Whereas a lot of people could name the big Silicon Valley VCs and stuff like that. And so I wanted to again in some kind of tiny little way, correct for that and just expose those stories.
Speaker 2:So that's why yeah, and they do have interesting stories. As you run with sound funding bore out episode by episode. Can you share some things you've learned along the way with making sound funding?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the really cool thing about so that when I I guess that's two years ago, two years ago that we started this and the interesting thing is I thought I would. I thought it would be really hard to get guests and there would be a lot of research and stuff like that. But but in fact, especially with things like LinkedIn, you can see, you know there are people, people are there in your feed and they're writing really interesting things and you can, if you write to them and say, do you want to be on this podcast? People almost always say yes, and I think you know, and I think I've maybe had like two or three people say no and it was always because, like they're, you know, they had a baby last week or they're too busy, and you know it's always, it's never no, it's always later, and so I mean that's really interesting. So that just also a few.
Speaker 1:You know I don't think I've totally taken advantage of this yet, but the access that you can get to people, I mean you know you can, especially once you've got some track record on the podcast, has been around a while. You know people. You can start getting kind of some bigger names who definitely would not, you know, say yes to a 60 minute zoom with you, and fair enough and understandably so. So that that's one the it's a great way as a host to connect people. So one thing I love is I was booked. You know, most of my episodes are half an hour but I was booked an hour and usually it's the first time I've.
Speaker 1:You know, a lot of the times it's the first time I've talked to someone and you get to know them kind of for half an hour as well.
Speaker 1:And you know, without hitting record, and you can do so much connection with people and that I find that really helpful and so you can kind of like serve your, your base as well. And then I found myself a lot of times, especially as you start to get more and more episodes, that you're in a conversation with someone you know and they'll say something or say, oh yeah, you should check out episode seven. You start sort of like referring to your library of episodes, like I'm not going to explain this to you now Go check out the concept in episode seven, and then maybe, lastly, is that interviewing is a skill, and if I look at, you know, if I look at the early ones versus the early episodes, versus kind of later on ones. You get more comfortable with it, you get kind of better at it, and so it's a skill that's been fun to develop and that I'm continuing to develop. I mean, I will be as far as as long as I'm doing this.
Speaker 2:I'm wondering if some of well clearly you're an excellent interviewer. I mean, if you listen to all of those podcasts does some of your style of interviewing come from your background as a founder, as a consultant?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think you know as well, maybe you know as a founder, as an investor. A lot of times you're an consultant. A lot of times it's about it's almost like an investigative journalist skill, right. So what if I'm doing due diligence on something or looking at an opportunity, I always pretend basically like I'm in it, like how would an investigative journalist look at this? And knowing when to push, knowing when kind of to ask the follow up question, and yeah, so I think you know, I think, and also trying to kind of figure out what matters, right. So not. So you know it's fine to go down rabbit holes, but to make sure that the overall kind of superstructure holds of, like you know why are you doing this? Is this a problem that matters Like? So I try to start with some of these big, you know meta questions as well, before kind of zeroing in Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, I want to resurrect a sound funding question for you, because I noticed you asked this one at the end of a lot of episodes. What is the thing to do in Vienna, where you're based?
Speaker 1:So you know, I have to say I'm a huge fan of Vienna. I moved here from Berlin two and a half years ago just because I love the city so much and I was getting tired of Berlin. It's there's so much going on here. The funny thing is everyone has this impression of Vienna as being kind of like they think of classical music and Waltzing and stuff like that. Right, and it's actually quite a dynamic city. It's a university town, there's a lot going on right. There's a really you know, there's a great music scene that is not just Mozart and Strauss, and but one of the things that's great about it is that you're always very close to nature.
Speaker 1:So you know, I live very, I live right downtown Vienna, but in 10 minutes I can be on the dog beach on the Danube Island and that's one of my favorite places, I think you know in the world. So I'll go there. I've got a great dain and I'll go and I'll go swimming with her and then I'll just lie on the beach and read a book while she's running around playing with all the other dogs and, and you know, chasing poodles in the water and stuff like that. And it's 10 minutes away, but I feel like I'm in Croatia or something like that, and so you know that's really special. Not a lot of major cities or, you know, world capitals have the ability where you can just sort of jump into the river right out front. But you know it's a very clean city in that sense.
Speaker 2:And your dog's name is Gracie.
Speaker 1:Gracie, gracie, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sounds like Gracie is living her best life. She's pretty happy dog. Yeah, well, this is a bit connected to, yeah, the question on style of interview, but from listening to quite a lot of your podcasting, you seem to bring your investor perspective in particular to a lot of it. Now what I'm wondering is is that perspective something that's kind of always on in your life? Is it hard to set that aside while moving through the world?
Speaker 1:I, you know. I mean I do often look at things with kind of an investor lens. I find it much harder and maybe because this is because I started so young as a founder but I have a really hard time turning off my founder lens. That's much harder, and so whenever I see, I'm always looking for inefficiencies and wondering, you know, is there an opportunity to do that better? And is that opportunity like a company or a nonprofit? So I'm more looking at it that way. I would say Interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it leads me to want to revise my hat's metaphor to the lenses metaphor.
Speaker 1:Just don't mix them yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm trying not to Okay. Well, let's talk about the current podcast, another climate tech podcast. I'm a fan, I love the name, but why? Why does the world need another climate?
Speaker 1:Well, you know the thing is so. Again, though, my, you know, my starting point wasn't I want to be, I want to start a podcast. My starting point was where are the podcasts telling these stories? And? And I really couldn't find any, you know, I mean, since then I've found a couple, and if I could just give a shout out to two of them that I really like, one's called climate insiders, with you and Bernaud, who's a climate tech investor himself. When he says insiders, it really is insiders and it's very much kind of industry driven, so I don't think it's kind of super accessible to just the average person.
Speaker 1:Another one called clean techies, with Silas Manor and some meal agarwal, and I did a crossover episode with these guys.
Speaker 1:They're based in New York, it's a bit more of a US focus.
Speaker 1:So, you know, I found those, and then there's mine, and beyond that there's not a ton, but when I did, when I set out, I really couldn't find many at all, and I did originally I called it the climate tech podcast, and actually the UN had one that they ran for like about a year or something out of Denmark and and then stopped in 2022 or something like that, and I thought, you know, okay, well, this one's kind of doesn't look like it's going to be a four.
Speaker 1:But then I thought, okay, no, I don't want to deal with, like UN lawyers or something like the copyright issues. So I just decided to call it another climate tech podcast and and I think it also kind of represents, you know, I try to keep things a little bit looser. It's not a super technical one, it's it's got to. I try to instill a bit of kind of rye humor here and there and keep things light. So, you know, I feel like it ends up being on brand, even though you know that it came first, before we were even doing anything, we being me.
Speaker 2:Switching gears a little bit. I was reading a recent LinkedIn post of yours where you talked about looking for good judgment in founders. I love the post, but that quality judgment seems so elusive. How do you find it in people? How do you get to that?
Speaker 1:I think you can find it when you get to know people. My challenge I wrote this from the perspective as an investor my challenge is how do you get to know people in the phase before you write the check? You get to know them pretty well once they have the money in the bank, and it's a multi-year kind of relationship for better or for worse. The answer is I'm working on it. That post seemed to get a fair bit of resonance on LinkedIn, but it was literally just something I whipped together in a coffee shop in five minutes and just came to my mind. It's something I want to work on In the heady days up until 2021 in the investment space, where everything was. This is a hot deal. Say yes, say yes. You've got 10 minutes to get on it because it's moving fast and you're like whoa Now, where things are swung probably a little too far on the other side.
Speaker 1:I think there is now, once we find equilibrium, there will be a way to have these conversations and to be able to assess people and test these kinds of things out. What I'm actually working on right now, as I come up to a period of making some new investments, is kind of a formal interview process where I'll design and kind of engineer questions to find out some things about people and judgment, because when you're investing at the precede stage, it's just all about the team and people are making so many judgments every single day. It's going to be really. That's what you need. You need to screen for ethics and these kinds of things, but they just need to be able to make good decisions nine times out of 10. That's the name of the game.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In climate tech, in impact, there are lots of people who switch careers to do these things. I'm wondering if you envision a future where this is the career you choose as a young person, and maybe from your perspective, as a young person who really started out as a founder, as opposed to switch to this. If so, how is the system going to allow that to happen?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean there's a definitional question here because it's changing. Also, what's climate tech? Climate tech 10 years ago is kind of a niche. 10 years from now it's everything. The metaphor I use for that is the internet, because when I started in the 90s I started an internet company. How often do you hear someone say they're starting an internet company today? It's because the internet is like. It's like it underlies everything that you do. Then you break that into like I'm building a customer relationship management company or whatever, but all of these things are have the undercarriage of the internet. And I think the same will be said of climate change or of climate tech pretty soon. So you know, all jobs will kind of switch into that and we'll have that element kind of underlying it. I think that that's happening Still today. It's like people have to make that conscious choice that they wanna commit to that. Because we're still in this like early part of the transition.
Speaker 1:And I get in trouble when I do talks at universities and say you know, especially at business schools, I have an MBA.
Speaker 1:And when I talk at business schools I often say, like you have a choice right now. You know you can go work for McKinsey, but know that you're actively making the world a worse place, you know, and I don't. You know it's one of the great things about being an independent person is that I can say things like that, because, yes, I mean, sure, there are things that are changing at places like that and these big consultancies, but they're also still. You know, one of their biggest clients is Saudi Aramco and these types of things, so they're talking at both sides of their mouth right now, and I think we need to call these kinds of things out and make it clear with young people, which is what I'm trying to do, and people will really. They look at me like I'm crazy sometimes when I give these talks about climate tech, but it is, this is right and somebody has to say that, and so, like I try to, you know, speak truth to students.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, do you think schools are prepared to, are equipped to prepare young people to work in climate tech?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, I think some of the more technical schools are for sure. I don't know about business schools right now. I'm not like. I still think the there's a long way to go with most business schools, where there's still, you know, it's still always just about the prestige of the investment bank, like these business schools. When I was there and I don't feel like it's changed too much. It's like the three paths you have are consulting, banking or corporate, you know, or consulting and then corporate, and so you know that's a while ago, but I don't necessarily feel like they're celebrating this stuff. It's not. It's still kind of like there's a sustainability track or there's a sustainability, you know, semester or something like that, but it's not the kind of core of it's not core of the way it needs to be if we really believe this is a climate crisis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, looking ahead, let's just limit it to 2024 of the year. What are some of the trends and topics you're tracking closest right now?
Speaker 1:I, you know well, everything's had a tough go with funding for the past couple of years, but alternate proteins has kind of for sure. There's a lot of money being fed into disinformation and a lot of lobby money going into the, you know, food and meat industries, and dairy especially. We have, you know, notoriously big budgets for lobbying. So I'm watching really closely how that is being put out and how it's being countered and seeing some green shoots about like getting slapped on the wrists for making false statements by politicians. But that has to be kept up because, although you know, if you go into a grocery store every week, you go there. There are more products, alternative products, and consumption is increasing, but you know, you wouldn't know it by reading the news or that type of thing. So that's really important to me and I feel like, especially as we see AI and generative AI and voice AI coming about, we're gonna start seeing disinformation, you know, which already plays a massive role out there, playing a bigger and bigger one. So that's something that I'm keeping an eye out for.
Speaker 2:Well, you brought up the grocery store and it reminded me of a question I'd like to ask you what does the ideal Ryan Grant little grocery store look like, the grocery store of the future?
Speaker 1:It has like 20 varieties of super spicy buffalo wings that are either plant-based or from cultivated meat. I always joke. I mean people assume you know a lot of the time, because I'm in the food tech space, that I'm kind of like this foodie and I'm totally not, and like I'm a junk food guy. And it's for me. It's not about my health, it's about like planetary and animal health. And yeah, that future grocery store. I will go into it and buy like 10 types of chicken wings and bring them home to my air fryer and go on vacation for a week in sweatpants. That's my ideal grocery store, plus you know times vacation. Wow, and I've. Also, I just saw that Lindor has come out with a vegan line of chocolates. You know these ones that are like in the, in the, in the. So that popped up on my LinkedIn. I'm very excited about about those. So these kinds of things you know like, yeah.
Speaker 2:And you've been vegan for how long?
Speaker 1:Well, that's a good question. I mean, I've been vegetarian for almost 20 years, but I've been vegan for like less than a year. You know, full, like fully. And it's still one of those things where, like I'm just sitting there in a cafe, I'm like, oh, I'm eating a croissant, I'm vegan.
Speaker 2:You know. And getting back to the you know the topics. Is there anything on your bookshelf that you want to shout out to listeners?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, mean, you know, the the funny thing is, at the moment I mean not just at the moment I read. I generally read a novel every week or every two weeks, and and that's more and more a form of escape that I really need. And so you know, I'm not reading a lot of industry books or climate books. I'm getting a lot of that stuff through, you know, through LinkedIn, through conversations, through like that type of thing, and I so I recently this. I mean this could sound so pretentious, but I recently reread Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, which, which is the one that you know, like as an undergrad, you're supposed to walk around with just to look cool, and that most people never actually read, and it's just reaffirmed that I think it's the best work of fiction that is, like, I mean, at least of our lifetimes, and I don't know, have you read it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and I would ask you, why do you think it has such a following among tech people in particular? Because whenever I get into conversations with it, it's always with somebody, somebody from some front, some permutation of the tech world, and they always love it To be honest, I didn't know that it had a following in the tech world.
Speaker 1:I know it, I know it has a following kind of in like the New Yorker. You know coastal liberal elites and stuff like that. So I guess that scans.
Speaker 2:Well, lastly, Ryan, do you have any advice for me as I go on to his podcasts for Impact Europe?
Speaker 1:Well, so first of all, let me say thanks. I mean, this is a great way to hand over to you. So this is episode number 25 of Sound Fun. I guess this is a crossover episode, but I've crossover episode. It'll be on both. I'll put it out also on another climate tech podcast. It'll be Triple Threat crossover episode, but it's episode 25.
Speaker 1:And so I'm super happy to be handing over the torch to you and I think your role there as like the chief storyteller, is a super important one.
Speaker 1:So for me, you know what I the advice would be please find ways to keep telling these stories and also to find the stories you know that aren't just kind of you know, popping up in front of you or or or so obvious, because some of the people who are doing the most interesting work aren't the ones with 10,000 followers on LinkedIn and at every conference and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So to find those people, the kind of the gems out there, I think is really important to give them a platform and a you know a way to talk about this stuff and you know to keep asking why.
Speaker 1:I think, like the a la Simon Sinek, that a lot of times, the deeper questions and the kind of understanding the implications or the, or the motivations are really important. So not just like what are you doing, what's the thing, but why and why does the world need this and you know, how are you doing it different, and kind of these secondary questions. And then the last thing I'd say is just to be of service. So I really tried to be of service to my, both my audience, and to the, the guests, and that meant a lot of times connecting people and you know people have been hired because of the podcast. People have raised money, you know like funds have raised money because of it. All kinds of great things have happened, connections made, and so you know, I would, I would consider continue to think of that as a kind of tradition of service with the podcast, which is, I think you know, my motive. What was that was my motivation to start it in the first place?
Speaker 2:Wow, Ryan, all of that advice truly, truly resonates. If I had to pick one piece of it, it's the why question. I really do love asking people why, just on, just on a human level, I I just feel like I need to know. So listeners can't see this, but I am raising my coffee cup and cheers to you, cheers to to why, to asking why. And if I may make one correction, I have been very flattered that you have called me the chief storyteller. But I am not the chief of anything. I am but a humble, humble storyteller. And if I had my druthers I would keep my job title to just storyteller Vice storyteller, vice storyteller, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to be back in a minute, maybe someday. Thanks again for joining Ben it's been such a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
