YouSaid · the spoken record

Shomik Dutta

lines on the record: 63
first: 2024-01-19
most recent: 2024-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But I will say, I do think climate is one of these mega trends that is just here. And it doesn't, you know, it is probably the easiest arbitrage investment I can imagine, which is to bet on scientists or an opinions editor at the Wall Street Journal. And so I just recommend to the listeners to really start paying attention to this once you start looking at it, the investment opportunity, the opportunity to make money is eye watering in addition to being able to sleep well at night.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 10 years ago it was still a little bit more of a cottage industry with ultra low cost interest rates and the zero interest rate environment allowed folks to take rewarding bets that delayed revenue recognition for 10 years because it was effectively free. And so that was a heyday. I wish I had been doing venture more consciously then it's funny.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a startup is the equivalent of a campaign, which is incredibly flat, incredibly labor-intensive. And so my advice to anyone that wants to get involved in politics or in climate is go work at a startup or go work in a campaign and just be the person they can turn to. If you figure that out, if you can be a person that I can turn to or any leader can turn to and know that they are going to handle that task well, there's a really quick ramp rate for you.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little tough. But, you know, he has this sort of line that our kids will look us in the eye one day and say, what were you thinking or were you even thinking at all, which kind of haunts me.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ministry for the future. It's a climate dystopia of the first chapter involves 20 million Indians dying in a heat wave. And we are going to start seeing thermal temperatures around 155 degrees, which just got clocked in Tehran. And so imagines what happens to human life? How does human life flourish in those temperatures? And then every other chapter is a scientific sort of examination of the underlying sort of science transition. So Ministry for the Future is fantastic. I just read David Wallace Wells' book, The Uninhabitable Earth, which is excellent. You'll need a shot of whiskey after reading it. Oh, really?”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People Absolutely. Absolutely. Books to recommend to the listeners. Ministry for the future is probably the best book on Climate I've ever read.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know my father, who is still the closest person to me in my life apart from my wife, was my earliest mentor and I couldn't be luckier to have had him. And he was the one that always challenged us. Let us said, you can do anything, but whatever you do, be the best at push yourself and do something big and help a lot of people. And so that is the sort of challenge that continues to push me today. I was also really lucky to work for Governor Martin O'Malley really closely with President Obama and learn from them. And then guys like Julius Janikowski, who is the FCC chairman, who's a partner at Carlisle, now an investor in Overture, has been a longtime mentor and friend to me. And I'm also mentored by my friends. They say to be happy, make friends that are less successful to you to be successful, make friends more successful than you. And all of my friends are more successful than me. I learn from them all the time. And although, you know, what's that Gorvy doll line? Every time a friend succeeds, a small part of me dies, I still feel a little bit of that.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an unbelievable TV show about the French intelligence service called The Bureau that is a must watch. And it's sort of the what a U.S. allied intelligence service, how they dealt with Syria, how they dealt with Iraq, how they dealt with the United States from their perspective. Must watch.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could find it. Did it go up? It's $50,000 to start. Quite expensive, yeah. One of the tensions I have just to speak plainly is that. Americans like to drive big things, but from a climate perspective, ultimately it is kind of a joke to say like the EV hummer is good. You're actually better off driving a used F-150 Ford Ranger than buying a new EV hummer because of the carbon intensity of the manufacturing process. And so that's the thing we need to massage. We do need to make this transition. You should probably surprise and delight customers, but buying giant heavy vehicles that are not traveling very far and don't need to be as giant and heavy is not the ideal outcome, though probably this sort of consumer taste is here and we need to fulfill it.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For one, we can never bend the laws of physics or chemistry. And so we are taking engineering risk, but we don't take science risk as a fund. I think the two hardest things to bet on are sticks that come from the federal government that will actually put a price on carbon and ultimately ban a lot of fossil fuel alternatives. And second, higher interest rate environments are going to be enormously punishing for capital-intensive transitions. And so I think the two obstacles we face today are thankfully not technology, right? A lot of the technology we need to do this transition is here. The two obstacles are one, what's the regulatory environment that will force fossil fuels?”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So these software marketplaces will be really an interesting way of demonstrating how giant the IRA opportunity is today.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to overstate how staggering and ambitious and exciting the Inflation Reduction Act is. This is the single most comprehensive and aggressive climate bill ever produced by any country or anywhere. And what this is doing is allowing OEMs and asset owners to pull forward innovation because it is simply making these things cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives because of these eye watering incentives. And so interestingly, I'll give you an example. We actually have a company at a software company called Crux, which is a marketplace for tax credits generated by the IRA. The ITC and PTC tax credits will be about $83 billion per year according to Credit Suites, which is about 17% of total corporate tax liability. And so this will have to flow from the producers of those credits to big banks, family office, places like where you work that can actually monetize those credits and help your clients save money today on taxes.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, think of being able to drop something into their existing engines molecularly identical to jet fuel A that happens to be entirely carbon neutral, something that is actually derived from captured CO2 either atmospherically or otherwise. And so this is what gets us excited, right? Hydrogen aircraft would require you to invent a new aircraft. Think about how long FAA approvals take. Electric aircraft will be great for short distances, but for long-haul aircraft, we don't see a path given the weight and density of those lithium-ion batteries that you mentioned. And so if you can provide the multi hundreds of billions of dollars of jet fuel that is consumed every year with something fully decarbonized, it's going to be a much attractive and more easier path for airlines to adopt.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sustainably aviation fuels, and we think this company can do it cheaper ultimately than what jet fuel A costs in the market over time. And so when you consider United Airlines and these companies, all of which have made commitments to use half of their fuel mix for sustainabilization fuel, there's a software-like scale-up, a thousand X increase we're going to need to see in the coming years. And so that gets really exciting if you can beat jet fuel at their own game and produce something cheaper, why wouldn't an airline want to use that?”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is geothermal heating and cooling, which previously inaccessible to big buildings because of the depth required to drill would meet a rig that can't operate in urban environments. And so the magic of this company is they can go to companies and say, look, I can beat your heating and cooling bills with a decarbonized solution that will save you money in OpEx and get you an unbelievable amount of credits from the US government. And so those are technologies we get really excited about. Built environment is 40% of global emissions, 40%. So it is not a sexy sounding thing, but it's very important. If you want to think about some of the more interesting sort of risk on parts of our portfolio, there's an unbelievable company called Linean Labs we recently invested in alongside Union Square Ventures and a bunch of other unbelievable funds. They're building sustainable aviation fuels. Sustainable aviation fuels can take industrial CO2 waste and repurpose it and remake it using a Fisher troph process and a reverse water gas shifter to then produce”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right. An immense amount of fossil fuel energy using natural gas, still using diesel, still using coal in some cases in parts of the world, and yet everybody's urbanizing, we're building bigger buildings, and it's becoming an up-ex headache in some cases. And so we're investors in a company called Bedrock that I'm excited to announce. This is a technology founded by Jocelyn Lye and her co-founder Sylvia, who is the chief scientist of Baker Hughes. And he's basically taken a lot of ultra advanced oil and gas rig technology and invented a miniaturized rig that can drill subsurface to the depth required to unlock heating and cooling for huge buildings. So CIM, the largest asset owner America with a million square feet on her ownership, invested in this technology. This sounds like G.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the heating and cooling of big buildings is a place of major focus, the built environment buildings are responsible for that.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sensational, and it's such a terrific example of how the US government can do things so much faster when it puts its mind to it. And in emergencies, and I believe climate change will be an emergency that will affect everybody and will all have to spend the rest of our lives solving together. There is no entity large enough that can scale innovation quickly enough to hit these net zero targets. And that's what makes it such an important place. And these National Labs started their origin from the Manhattan Project, and they gave us vision, right? Ultimately, our nuclear plants came out of the Manhattan Project, and it's a good example of what happens when you get a lot of buy-in and a lot of focus from government to unlock things, which is what the period of time we're about to enter right now in climate.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I just watched Oppenheimer with my business partner to meme. I don't know if you've seen that yet. Oh, fantastic.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you factor in things like 45x, this company Harbinger could have negative cogs. And so when you think about what that means for the scale of deployment, I would say the big surprise is not a particular technology. It's just going to be the speed and scale of deployment is going to singe your eyebrows. It's going to be incredibly exciting. We're talking about a trillion dollar wall of money coming from the US government, from the inflation reduction act, the chips bill and the infrastructure bill, to scale the deployment of a lot of decarbonized technologies, to remake the world, as we've described. And so that's what gets me really excited.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of the IRA incentives, the inflation reduction incentives have yet to be realized in the market. There's a provision in the IRA called 45X. And what 45X does is for the first time since World War II pays OEMs to make things. So back to my betting analogy. If you were a betting manufacturer and the government wanted you to make parachutes, they would just pay you to make those parachutes before they even bought the parachute. And so you were going to see a staggering scale of deployment where investors in a company called Harbinger, which is an electric mid-duty truck, one of the most important vehicles on the road, the workhorses that drop off all of our e-commerce delivery equipment. There is nobody building a good mid-duty truck today. Harbinger is building a mid-duty EV truck that is going to beat ice trucks at their own game before incentives.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think a big challenge here is that there's real national security issues around building nuclear plants. And if you talk to the national security community, they're very worried about being able to take enriched uranium and build dirty bombs out of it. And so if you couple the amount of intense regulatory scrutiny out of the nuclear regulatory world, which is the most brutal place, if you want to talk about regulatory risk, national concerted security considerations, cost overruns, time, and a lack of deep specialization in this country, I think candidly, we're better off investing in wind, water through hydroelectric power, solar, and batteries. Those are scaled and ready to be deployed right now. And fusion already happens, right? We are already harnessing the energy of the sun in our solar panels. And so I am personally more bullish on that as a method of deployment.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's going to be incredibly electricity intensive and potentially power direct air capture. So I think there's certain use cases there. But again, to learn that, you have to modularize and build a factory method that allows you to iterate and improve on your production, not build these one-off plants that are all looking different, all running out of money, all over cost.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I'm a bit more of a skeptic, I think, in the tech communities, you get a lot of folks who roll their eyes and say, just build nuclear and you'll be fine. The cost overruns in nuclear have been astronomic. And in building the grid scale plants, everyone is different, whereas the South Koreans are stamping out units and learning from them increasingly over time. We don't have those learnings here. And so on average, a nuclear plant is taking 20 years to build. It is going 300% over cost. And so I am excited about the miniaturized nuclear applications. We're going to need a lot of energy to do things like electrolyzed hydrogen.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct the universe. Correct. And so Commonwealth Fusion companies like Avalanche, which are in the lower carbon portfolio, are incredibly exciting. In the interim, there's interesting innovation for grid scale storage coming from companies like Form Energy and hopefully Antora in our portfolio is also going to be able to provide a huge storage buffer. And so as you correctly note, lithium ion is ill-suited for long duration storage, right? For four to six hours, if you need to slam something quickly, it's perfect. And so we think lithium ion will continue to power most electric vehicles, electric aircraft. But for grid scale long-duration storage, you're going to require innovation. And that innovation is going to have hundreds of billions of dollars of reward waiting on the other side of it.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there are a lot of interesting things happening in Fusion right now that we're tracking. We have not made an investment, but I think the rate of exponential improvement and possibility infusion is coming much faster than people realize.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need a paradigm shift in energy production. You know, if you're going to electrify everything, think for a moment about electrifying every form of vehicle transportation. You're not going to have gas stations anymore. You're going to have to charge them. And so the estimates are that the United States is going to have to triple its energy production, its electricity production in its borders alone over the next 15 to 25 years. An enormous undertaking, right? We're talking about trillion dollar CapEx required to be able to reinvent the grid. And at the heart of this is where can you dry the lowest cost electricity and have it be available plentifully and in firm power 24-7? And so storage and I think batteries will be that's my next question is”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the lowest cost, most scalable, most efficient version of this? Direct air capture today still pencils around six hundred dollars per tonne, enormously electricity intensive. We have drifted a little bit more towards two categories. The first is enhanced rock weathering, where investors in a company called Ion that has pulverized a certain silicate rock called olivine that can help basically grow more crops for farmers. They're very familiar with it. It's basically a form of fertilizer while it also sucks carbon out of the atmosphere permanently. Very excited about technologies like that. We're also investors in a company called Climate Robotics that is similarly taking agricultural waste and pyralizing it, basically cooking it in an oxygen-free environment, and producing something called biochar, which is an excellent soil amendment. It helps crops grow more. Farmers crave biochar, but it also”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you believe the science, the IPCC has stated we're going to need to remove 10 billion tons of carbon every year by the year 2050. And if you look at what we did last year, we did about 6,000 tons. So there's a 2 million x scale-up that has to happen, or a 74% Keger, which is twice the growth of software. So there's an enormous undertaking. The question for us is,”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not doing this out of the goodness of my heart. I candidly kind of missed the internet. I was so involved in politics. And if you consider some of the mega cycles software eating the world, China opening up, ultra low cost interest rates, I think this is another megacycle coming. And I don't want to miss it. And like all megacycles, being early is the same as being wrong. And so a lot of our job is timing our bets to make sure where can technoeconomics just beat fossil fuels? Let's invest behind that right now.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does and interestingly, a lot of the materials today are reaching that high point, right? At some point, semiconductors are reaching the theoretical limits of how many transistors you can wedge in. And so that's why innovating with ferroelectric materials and using AI to be able to optimize all of the dizzying different kind of material combinations we can consider is what we need to do for this next layer of industrial revolution. So when you consider just the 10 trillion in EBITDA, start considering every manufacturing process today as we do it, every food production process, the way we move ourselves with transportation, the way we grow food in agriculture, all of this is going to have to reorient in about 50 years if you believe the science. And old conglomerates, large-scale conglomerates are usually not the places that drive innovation. And that's what makes venture such an interesting catalytic asset class to me in climate.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And the company today is the production of their metal is so expensive that only ultra advanced defense manufacturers and companies testing R&D can afford it. The bet is that they can drive down the cost by 1 1000th the cost over time and produce something that is just better than the industrial inputs that have very carbon intensive emissions footprints as we've mentioned before. And so if you're an aircraft and can find something lighter than aluminum that can help your aircraft travel farther, that's a money saver for the company. And so those, yep.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are moonshot examples of what we're looking for and that require a lot of technological and go to market innovation to be successful. But if they are, I think there are a trillion dollar rewards on the other side.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an incredibly patient, deeply liquid game. But to radically oversimplify what we look for, we're looking for visionary, unbelievable founders, founders are the soul of startups, and we're looking for unbelievable founders with deep expertise in what they're building, coupled with differentiated technology that can help unlock gigantic markets. And so to give you a couple of examples, we're investors in a company called Dextmat, which has invented a carbon nanotube technology that is stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, and more conductive than copper. Copper is going to be one of the most important metals in all of electrification. Aluminum is in every aircraft, in every airplane, a lot of phone poles and wires, and steel is steel. This technology might fully decarbonize in a carbon negative way a metal that is stronger, more conductive, and lighter. And so those”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture capital is an incredibly patient game, right? On average, 10 to 12 year positions you're taking. As we saw with Union Score Ventures' first fund, I think it took them almost 16 years from start to finish. That worked out pretty well, didn't it? That worked out great.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can actually produce alpha for their investors because it's a bit like in World War II, if you knew what the US government needed, if they were going to need to pay betting manufacturers. Bedding manufacturers to make parachutes, you know, that's an important insight to be able to drive the best investments through.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Success in this new world coupled with next generation compute that's also within our own supply chain. And so the last time we saw a great power struggle like this was in the semiconductor boom where Fairchild semiconductors, Intel, Texas instruments were built. Those were not like the bits that are traded in software today. Those were atoms. It was hardware investing that governments were deeply involved in. So the 50% of the revenue of Fairchild in the early days came from the Pentagon. Similarly, TSMC when it was built, 50% of that CapEx was handled by Taiwan. And when Samsung went into semiconductors, the same proved true of the South Korean government. The same is going to be true of climate investing today. A lot of the innovative hardware must be built today, and that will require intense government involvement. And that's why Overtures thesis is that investors that deeply understand and can navigate government and regulatory complexity.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are absolutely the cheapest forms of electricity available in most places in the world today. A staggering statistic the capex of a new solar plant is today cheaper than the OPEX, the annual OPEX of a coal plant. Really? And so these things, you know, the human mind is sometimes bad at tracking exponential change. The logarithmic drop in solar and wind prices continually surprises even the most bullish analysts. And I think the same is now coming true for lithium ion and a lot of these other technologies. And so we are dropping down these logarithmic cost curves. And what's interesting is I think there's a geopolitical reality today in a global contest for power with China. The countries that are able to have the lowest cost of plentiful energy that does not require any kind of foreign inputs, that has a domestic supply chain underneath it that can produce that energy on their own, that will be one of the key drivers to global hedge demand.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kiss with a smirk on his face. The key is to now transition from natural gas. You know, natural gas is a nice word for methane. It's primarily methane. And methane is about 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide. And so if carbon dioxide is one blanket thick to keep the earth warm, you can think of LeBron James height blanket that molecule traps far more heat and doesn't allow our sunlight to radiate back to outer space as it should. And so the key now is that renewables have this extensive runway since we thought of natural gas as a bridge fuel. And candidly, the lowest costs of energy today are solar and wind. And so businesses can make rational decisions to adopt them. And the key is to now sort of transition us off this sticky drug that we've been addicted to for some time.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was correct. It was absolutely a better source of fuel than coal, which produces black suit and all kinds of problems and diesel.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies in the space. So the Coke Industries is behind this company, has taken them to a lot of their conglomerates. And it's a really exciting technology because it is just beating natural gas at its own game. And that is a theory of change for us is that if you can beat natural gas at its own game and save conglomerates and big businesses money, they will adopt your technologies. It becomes more challenging when you're bringing them green premiums and things that are a little more expensive.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing about this company is they're not going, you know, it's called the Mr. Burns test. I can go to a conglomerate who does not care a lick about climate change and convince them that I can save them OPEX with this decarbonized solution. It has nothing to do with climate change in their minds and they would still want to do investment.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, one of the central insights here is that industrial heat is the key input to manufacturing just about anything. If you think about steel making from iron, if you think about concrete, if you think about a lot of food and ethanol, methanol production, all of it requires in the United States alone $140 billion worth of industrial heat, almost all of which comes from natural gas or coal, and to get really high temperatures from that heat is sometimes difficult. And so there are breakthrough technologies we're excited about, one called Antora in particular, financed by Bill Gates and Chris Saka and by Overture. And these three Stanford PhDs have figured out a way to take grid-connected renewable electricity and produce industrial heat above 1800 degrees Celsius. And when you think about the hardest to decarbonize industries, you know, about 95% of all industrial manufacturing can be decarbonized with that kind of heat.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rewiring of the economy that takes place as a result. When you think of every single aspect of industry, steel making, fertilizer, $10 trillion of EBITDA will be at stake in this turnover. And so there's an enormous prize for those that can innovate quickly and help decarbonize.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all required. Every single aspect of society will be impacted by climate change, and so every single aspect of society has something to contribute, and every asset class of capital from private equity to growth to debt will have to play a role. The reason governments are so centrally important is that it's not enough for us to look at business pain points caused by climate, of which there are many, by the way, supply chain disruption, extreme weather events. But you also need to start creating sticks at the same time to push fossil fuels off a cliff. And so I'm encouraged by the fact, for example, that internal combustion engine vehicles will be banned altogether in the state of California in 10 years. Similarly, France is banned all internal combustion flights within its own borders in the next 10 years. And so these sticks are also important to intersect with the carrots that help new technologies mature fast enough to replace them. And there will be a fundamental reason.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The twin problems we're going to realize in the near future are that we'll have these stranded energy assets that are often leaking methane. We have oil and gas wells that have sustained casing pressure that are bubbling methane. We need to seal those wells permanently or make use of the methane because the methane has a great deal of economic value. The second challenge we have is that our next generation compute is going to be incredibly electricity intensive far more than what we experience today. And so data centers are going to become OPEX pain points for a lot of companies. And so what Crusoe wants to do is resolve those two challenges, take Stranded Energy assets, utilize that energy creatively, and also ensure that we can decarbonize data centers, which are increasingly a large pain point in emissions. There's another company to mention we invested in recently called Biosqueeze, which has invented a new way of permanently sealing oil and gas wells. Some of these operators like Halliburton are spending millions of dollars sealing and resealing oil and gas well.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there was a great deal of heart palpitation about this cup in part because, as you correctly note, the head of the largest oil and gas company in Abu Dhabi was the same man in charge of the COP. And yet all 180 countries left with a firm commitment to decarbonize and to transition away from fossil fuels and oil and gas with an emphatic agreement around that big daring idea. That's the first time this has ever come out of a COP. And I think the US government's leadership in this, particularly on methane, is going to start reverberating through the market in a really positive way.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the experience from the Obama world was that everybody, you know, there's this big, great Bill Gates line that everybody underestimates what they can do in 10 years and overestimates what they can do in one year. And taking a long-term path to doing something really big and grinding on it for a long time can produce extraordinary outcomes. The president was the architect of the Paris Accords, which is the framework that the IPCC now uses to ensure that the world is driving to a net zero future. And so there is the sparkle I take away from the Obama days was a challenge from him, which is that we should do big things. And if you focus and execute every day for a long period of time, most people probably underestimate what they can accomplish.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep doing what you're doing. I'll keep apologizing. It's worth it. And it was like the highlight of my career. Is that your Obama?”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least at least twice. Though my favorite moment was in the Dungeons of 2007 when doldrums of 2007, we were 40 points down to Hillary Clinton and I was still producing multimillion dollar fundraising outcomes for him. And so one time when we dropped him off at the, you know, he would start events saying, who do I have to apologize to in here for you, Shameek? And I'd be like, that guy, that guy, that guy. So we dropped him back at his apartment and he doubled back to the car and he said, Shamik.”
2024-01-19 · Masters in Business · Shomik Dutta on Climate Tech Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source