Rustom Birdie

🌍💡 Embracing Interoperability: The Evolution of Carbon Markets 💡🌍 The landscape of carbon markets is rapidly evolving, with a significant shift towards fungibility and interoperability. What does this mean? We (at the SoHo Global Climate Fund) spoke with leading climate fund manager, Charles Bedford of Carbon Growth Partners, to shed light on this important trend in the carbon markets. It's about creating seamless connections between compliance and voluntary markets, allowing for the exchange and recognition of carbon credits across borders and sectors. This trend marks a pivotal moment in our collective efforts towards combating climate change. By enabling carbon credits to be fungible and interoperable, we're fostering a more efficient and scalable approach to carbon pricing and emissions reduction strategies. Companies and organizations now have greater flexibility to participate in markets that align with their goals. #CarbonMarkets #ClimateAction #Fungibility #Interoperability #Sustainability #Innovation #GlobalImpact

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NEWSLETTER ALERT! Ever wondered what's buzzing behind the scenes in #Proptech and #sustainability? 🌍 Join me in exploring cutting-edge #innovations and insights that shape our future. Sign up for our #newsletter and stay ahead of the curve! Don’t miss out on exclusive content that sparks change. Tap the link to subscribe now and let’s drive progress together! 👉 http://eepurl.com/h2kL1L 🚀 

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🌍 Microsoft continues to lead the market in forward procurement of carbon removals, across both nature and engineered solutions, last week announcing their carbon credits deal with Oxy. This transaction, hot on the heels of procuring 18m tonnes of removals in the first half of the year, highlights Microsoft’s commitment to paying the true price of high quality carbon removal and the confidence to support new projects and technologies. ⚡️ The hidden cost of AI… As AI manifests in every part of our lives, it is easy to overlook the incredible power requirements for the processing needed to drive this technology. The numbers out of the key big tech players in recent weeks are jaw dropping. Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft expect to invest $40bn on building out processing power this year alone. These ventures are incredibly power hungry. Data centers are expected require consume +800TWh of power by 2026 according to the IEA, and BCG estimated data processing could represent 7.5% of all power consumption in the US by 2030. 💡…and the multi-pronged steps big tech is taking Its easy to see the urgency for mitigating the impact of these power requirements that is being demonstrated through: 🤝 The formation of the Symbiosis Coalition 🌱 The 18m tons of removals procured by Microsoft already this year 👉 Google’s shift in its emissions mitigation strategy announced last week We often think of energy companies as the primary emissions behemoths, and while that holds true today, the landscape is shifting. In addition to engaging with carbon markets, the big tech firms are investing heavily in renewable power generation given the inability of traditional utilities to respond: 🔋 10.5GW of renewables capacity to be installed in a Microsoft-Brookfield JV (at a price tag of $1bn per MW 🖥️ $650m paid by Amazon for a Pennsylvania-based datacenter powered by a nuclear reactor ☢️ $500m being raised by ChatGPT for Oklo, a developer of nuclear micro-reactors As renewable energy overtakes hydrocarbons in power generation growth and our lives demand increasingly more processing power, the dynamics are evolving. Read the article on Microsoft’s deal with Occidental here: https://lnkd.in/dbW8fKjC #carbonmarkets #carbonoffsetting #carboncredits #voluntarycarbonmarkets

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Prime Coalition has long taken a different tack to climate finance compared to its for-profit brethren. It makes the usual venture-style investments in startups through Azolla Ventures and also helps philanthropists direct their money to climate-related projects that it deems high impact. Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce. #climatetech #climateVC #climatefinance

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Honored to represent Simple Thread at the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) Finance Forum in NYC. I really enjoyed the discussion with Gina McCarthy former climate advisor to the White House. My takeaways from her comments: - IRA was a game-changer because it allowed the “de-risking” of renewables and took away the “big P Politics of renewables” - Don’t worry about political futures at this point … because it makes too much sense “money is money” - Nuclear and hydrogen will be part of the future but unclear how much. Worries about siting of nuclear specifically - On permitting: “we have to get real about tradeoffs … we cannot let perfection be the enemy of the good.” - The success of the IRA is evident; over $350B already deployed - Constraints from supply side incentives like interconnection queue backlogs, supply chain constraints, and permitting require continued attention to resolve. #acorefinanceforum #renewableenergy #cleanenergy #policy #solar #wind #storage #transmission #finance

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Deep dive on Sylvera 🌎   Extra relevant this week with news that Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce will contract up to 20M tons of high-quality 🌱nature-based🌱 carbon removal credits by 2030, equivalent in volume to the 2030 carbon removal goals of California. https://lnkd.in/dzaEmh53   Learn more about how Sylvera is helping enterprises and governments get on track to net zero below 👇 #Sylvera #CarbonRemoval #Symbiosis

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Throw back Thursday! 😊Excited to look back at 2023 through the publication of our Catalyst Fund Impact Report! The report spotlights the hard work of our portfolio companies after a year of work with them, as they continue to build game-changing solutions from precision agriculture technologies to water access solutions or waste management tools. 👉 Dive into our portfolio companies' impact to date, our theory of change, and how we empower bold founders to build a climate-resilient future for millions of Africans. 👉 Learn about our gender lens investing approach, sustainability focus, and how our startups are driving green growth and positioning Africa as a leader in climate action. 👉 Explore spotlights on select portfolio companies and discover how Catalyst Fund's hands-on venture building accelerates the path to scale for early-stage climate tech in Africa 👉 See the recognition our fund has earned to date and join us in investing for a climate-resilient future on the continent. Sand to Green, Bekia inc, Visual and AI Solutions (VAIS), Assuraf | Insurance, Simply, Eight Medical | Techstars ‘23, Farmz2U, Farm to Feed, Octavia Carbon, PaddyCover, Agro Supply, NoorNation, Scrapays, THOLA, Earthbond, Zebra CropBank, Medikea, Keep IT Cool, Tolbi Link to download the report: https://lnkd.in/ejJjH6aD

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Going #electric at home may appear daunting and costly. However, with state and federal incentives, this shift becomes more feasible. DSIRE's (screenshot below) platform simplifies identifying available state incentives for renewable energy and efficiency initiatives. Companies like Rock Rabbit, EnergySage, Encentiv Energy, Opower, Rebate Bus, Sense, Enervee, Powerley, and others are demystifying these incentives, making them more accessible to homeowners. Learn more in Climate People's latest #1MinuteClimateSnippet: https://buff.ly/3KyG3Nz .

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Last week at Stripe Sessions, we at OMERS Ventures, in partnership with Recall Capital and Gusto Embedded, hosted a few founders, builders and investors to chat about current and future trends in embedded fintech and vertical software. A few of my big takeaways from the evening: 🤖 A lot of us on the media and content side see AI as an existential threat, but many of those on the SMB and entrepreneur side actually view it as a solution to the 'cold-start' problem of 'wtf do I actually put on my website?' when they sign up for a Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, whatever and have to actually populate a customer-facing surface for the first time 🥞 Point solutions are increasingly losing out to full-stack offerings, even in vertical markets where requirements up and down the stack are unique. Everyone building a point solution is looking at how and when to expand. I think the differentiator will be in what the starting line was and how that cascades through the company's DNA as it adds additional features and capabilities. 👩‍💻 Technical integration of embedded solutions remains a complex and frictionful process, even for so-called 'two lines of code' 'simple' plug-ins (they end up not being this when they encounter complicated, aging legacy codebases). Is this a place for AI to excel – can agents handle heavy lift codebase stitch-ins without the time and effort it takes devs on either or both sides now? All in all a fantastic evening with great discussions and a terrific panel hosted by Somrat Niyogi! Thanks to Fred (Fady) Helou, Elizabeth Olveda, Charity Hudnall, Jackson Reynolds, Jeremy Butteriss, Lucy Wang, Isabelle Cole, Sarah Tierney Niyogi, Matt Bocci, Yi Liu, Yanett Burgueño and many more for provoking the above thoughts and many more!

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Here’s a question investors are often asked: When evaluating early stage companies, how much time do you spend on due diligence around future exits? It’s not surprising we hear this question a lot. Also not surprising: it’s got a wide range of answers depending on the firm. Some don’t spend much time here at all. Others make it a point to put meaningful time in as part of their process. Our current thinking: take the time to do the work on public market comps. At Alpaca VC, we spend significant time understanding how public market investors will  realistically value a business based on margin profile, product, business model & TAM. In short, we want to know: how will this company be valued at scale when we get taken out? Yes, we can acknowledge that the journey toward exit is a windy road and that there may be pivots along the way, but there are still public market companies that have a business model similar to the early stage company you're evaluating. And you can always look at gross profit multiples if you think the margin profile will change over time. So we still do the work on the comps. Quantitative metrics we look at when making the comparison to public market comps include EBITDA multiple, revenue multiple, Gross Profit multiple or all of the above. As part of this process, it’s also important to factor in the public market company’s year-over-year revenue growth as this will also significantly impact the multiple it trades at. Simple example: if you have two public market companies with similar business models and similar margin profiles, but one's growing 100% year over year, and one's growing 50% year over year, then obviously the DCF (discounted cash flow) analysis is going to spit out a very different valuation for the one that's growing faster. Why this matters: When you take all of that information into account as you evaluate an early stage business, you can begin to create a realistic picture of how this company will be valued in the public markets at exit - or how an acquirer will value the company for an acquisition. Strategic acquirers may, of course, pay a premium, but we won’t underwrite for that. This allows us, for example, to form conviction around valuation based on revenue and gross profit predictions. If we think they can do $100M of revenue five years from now, we use this diligence process to form a thesis about whether the characteristics above (product, margin, business model, etc.) will cause the company to be valued at $200M vs. $500M vs. $1B at exit. Curious how other early stage investors think about underwriting an exit and how much time they’re spending on public market comps even though these companies are in their infancy.

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How much power do you feel like you hold at the local and national scale? 🤔 For those of us working in the climate realm, it's not always clear how our daily tasks can influence systemic shifts toward a green economy. Tonight, come hang with Climate Collective San Diego as we unpack climate policy and learn about tools and actions we can use to influence the decison-making process in our community 🏡 🌊 https://lu.ma/ie8o254a

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Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce have teamed up to launch the Symbiosis Coalition, an Advance Market Commitment (AMC) aimed at supporting the development of Carbon Removal Markets. By pledging to contract up to 20 million tons of carbon credits, the coalition aims to send strong demand signals to Project Developers to implement their Carbon Removal Projects with confidence and high integrity. The recent increase in Advance Market Commitments in nature-based projects, mostly led by Microsoft, will be followed by science-based restoration projects, further advancing the progress on the global 2050 #netzero goals. The demand and pricing for high-integrity carbon credits is increasing on a monthly basis, and by 2030, there will be a significant shortage of high-quality carbon credits in the global carbon markets. Project Developers in #Pakistan must not miss this "once-in-a-century" opportunity to register their #CDRprojects in the #VoluntaryCarbonMarkets. Today's announcement by these tech giants is yet another validation of what NextBillionX is building in the MENAP region. We are working closely with some of these global corporates on their buy-side #sustainability mandates to originate high-integrity #CarbonCredits from Pakistan. If you're planning to reduce your #CarbonEmissions or are already working on removing existing Greenhouse Gases on your industrial or nature-based projects, get in touch. We will help you monetize your Carbon Removal efforts!! 🌿 Decarbonization is the new currency 💰

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Summary: Co-founder of Collaborative Fund, Craig Shapiro speaks about their unique investment strategy in sectors like climate, health, and food and their impressive fundraising success in a tough market. Key takeaways: Collaborative Fund invests in non-traditional sectors like climate, health, and food, rather than the popular SaaS business model. The firm's sixth flagship fund raised $125 million in just over 90 days, despite the current challenging fundraising environment. The firm focuses on seed stage companies and emphasizes on addressing changing consumer spending habits and climate sustainability in their portfolio. Counter arguments: Some may argue that Collaborative Fund's focus on non-traditional sectors may not yield as high returns compared to popular sectors like SaaS. The difficult fundraising environment and lower interest from LPs could potentially affect the firm's future investments and success. #venturecapital #vc #venture #startups #fundraising

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Thrilled to announce the launch of our inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks at Emergence Capital. This comprehensive report dives deep into the metrics and trends shaping the early-stage enterprise cloud market. A huge thank you to our VC partners and contributors for making this possible! Here's a sneak peek of our findings: --> 60% of companies have already integrated GenAI into their service offerings, with another 20% planning to do so this year. --> While most companies use OpenAI as their primary LLM, many are experimenting with multiple models. We’re seeing a trend toward intelligently routing GenAI inference requests based on cost, performance, and security. --> Companies that have implemented GenAI are showing promising results, with a 7% higher NDR compared to those that haven’t. Beyond Benchmarks goes further with more GenAI trends, insights on the current fundraising environment, and key performance metrics. Our goal is to provide founders and their teams with valuable benchmarks to help them make better-informed decisions. At Emergence Capital, we're committed to helping founders build iconic companies. Dive into the full report here: https://lnkd.in/g6bnvAZM

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Divestment requirements have a very real cost. This reduces the ability of endowments and foundations to support their mission driven enterprises. As the list of divestment demands grow, at what point do the consequences outweigh the perceived benefits? Hiding at the end of this article is the below quote: Golden admitted the divestment had undermined Princo’s returns, saying the endowment “would have been better off” otherwise. But he pointed to a bigger concern: the pressure to “keep adding things to divest from”. “Fossil fuels are necessarily part of getting to where the overall economy needs to be [and] it would be impossible for the world to not use fossil fuels tomorrow,” he said. “Divestment is a pretty weak tool to change the economy.” https://lnkd.in/g3SeC8rg #energy #investing #vc

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Really like the Audere Capital team’s methodology and framework for thinking about over-the-horizon innovation technology, and the strong signals of future winners. • Wave 1: Extract (efficiency at lower cost/higher speeds) • Wave 2: Expand (into new high margin markets & products initially deemed impossible) • Wave 3: Entrench (standardize, institutionalize and become the default platform and system for its space) Boom! #vc #startups #investing #investorplaybook

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As we scale climate tech solutions, we need to carefully consider the impact to local communities. Thanks Evan Halper for a great front page article in today's The Washington Post that highlights this issue with a proposed CO2 storage plan in Montana. Injecting and storing CO2 in porous geological formations sounds scary, particularly given the negative side effects of fracking. I think the concerned ranchers in Montana are completely justified. But, we need to solve the climate crisis, and CO2 removal is an important part of the solution. This issue will continue as more and more first-of-a-kind (FOAK) projects break ground and expand. Early, frequent, and transparent community engagement is critical. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climateaction

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A topic that comes up often with companies we work with is how they think about the (Return on Investment) ROI of group travel for offsites and retreats. I’m excited to share thoughts in partnership with the Chief of Staff network tomorrow at 12 pm EST. You san RSVP here: https://lu.ma/kstmwma6 Before considering the ROI, we should consider the investment itself. 1. Prior to COVID, companies paid for rent (duh). Many companies paid $1.5-2.5K+ per employee per month per rent - Companies didn’t have a choice on whether or not to pay for rent - A right of passage for startups used to be raising a seed round, and taking out an expensive lease - In cities like SF and NY, rent is expensive: $80-100 per sq ft. - Based on avg. sq ft per employee, and other expenses like snacks, security, etc. spend on rent adds up! 2. With distributed work, companies have to spend less on rent (sometimes a LOT less) - Some remote companies are spending nothing or very little on rent - Even for in-person companies, because employees aren’t coming in every day the sq footage needs are down - The price of commercial real estate has also fallen considerably - For example, all we spend on rent at Marco for a few WeWork subscriptions for certain team members 3. Companies are now spending more on T&E (offsites and onsites) - Spend on rent is lower, but spending on T&E has gone up - More employees are distributed, but the need for in-person connection hasn’t gone away - Many companies are now investing in gatherings 2-4x per year - On the whole, companies should be saving money between rent and T&E 4. With much lower spending on rent, and higher spending on group travel, on the whole companies should be saving a LOT I’ll break this math down, and show how we’ve seen companies measure the impact of gatherings like offsites tomorrow! #employeeexperience #offsites #futureofwork

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As we dive into 2024, the Series A fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly daunting. Investment standards are soaring, and fewer startups are making the cut. Series A investors are finding many seed stage companies too premature. The median valuation jump from seed to Series A skyrocketed from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Investors now demand stronger revenue performance, targeting $2 million to $3 million in ARR, up from $1 million to $2 million. Alarmingly, only 12% of Q1 2022 seed startups secured Series A funding within two years, down from 31.8% in Q1 2020. #venture #earlystage #seedtoseriesa #seed #seriesa #inspireglobalventures https://lnkd.in/gW4bkcNy

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