From Engineer to VC: Craig Lawrence’s Journey in ClimateTech Investing

Silas Mähner: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Clean Techies, the podcast. This is season two, episode eight, or if you’re counting from the beginning, episode 20, please do subscribe to this podcast, wherever you’re listening or watching. If you’re watching on YouTube, please tap the bell to be notified next time we release And if you’re watching on or listening on Apple podcasts, please do review the show as it really does help us to continue to raise our distribution awareness.

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Today, we, I had the pleasure of speaking with Craig Lawrence, who’s somebody I’ve known for a little bit in this space, and he is the co founder and a partner at Energy Transition Ventures, or ETV for short. The conversation was really focused just generally speaking on climate tech investing and kind of his background and how we ended up in the investing space coming from a technical background.

I always find it very fascinating talking to people in this space because a lot of the Founders or kind of big change makers who end up in commercial leadership roles, had a technical background at one point or came from a technical background. So it’s very interesting episode. We had a lot of different things we discussed.

I will also apologize in advance. There was a few technical difficulties with some of the internet connection, but other than that, it was very great, very good conversation. So with that, let’s get right into the show. All right. Welcome. Welcome to the show, Craig. How’s it going?

Craig Lawrence: It’s going very well. Great to be here with you.

Silas Mähner: Absolutely. I’m very excited to have you on the show. Obviously we’ve talked in the past, but very excited to have you on and to talk about what you guys are doing. So why don’t you just give us a quick introduction on yourself, your background, some of your achievements, and maybe a little bit of how you ended up here.

Craig Lawrence: Sounds good. Yeah, so background, gosh grew up in Miami, Florida. A lot of people think that’s strange whenever I tell them, but I, I did that and was a very technical engineering focused person, the entire sort of first half of my life and career studied mechanical engineering was very into things and mechanisms and things that worked in the theory behind how they worked.

And so I studied engineering studied at the University of Texas. Had a job in the oil and gas industry for a consulting firm doing sort of engineering consulting for large refineries and chemical plants and things like that decided real quickly I didn’t like that and moved out to California. I went to graduate school at Stanford, continued to study mechanical engineering, product design had no interest in energy at that point.

Been turned off. By my oil and gas experience and was focused on other areas and ended up going to work for a company called IDEO, which is a global product design, innovation, consulting firm. At that time, it was very much an engineering firm. We were designing and building really cool products, medical devices, consumer electronics, furnitures, toys you name it.

IDEO was not an expert in any one particular industry, but just an expert in how to design really cool products. We did work for Apple, Palm Pilot, for those old enough to remember those type of products. Lots of really cool things. And I, just happened to be sitting at IDEO probably around 2006.

And someone came to the front desk someone just walked in the door and asked, said, Hey, I’m, I have, I’m a CEO of a solar company. I’d like to talk to someone at IDEO. And I just was on deck. I was just available. And so I met this CEO of the solar company, which Turns out to be First Solar which is, one of the largest and most successful solar companies in the world.

At the time they were, they had just IPO’d and were just on their way up. And and I ended up doing a project for First Solar. And just, I’ve been an engineer my whole adult life, but was my first exposure to a solar panel. And I was like, okay, this sheet of glass converts sunlight to electricity.

It was like magic. It was literally for me, it was my light bulb moment. No, no pun intended. And ended up doing a really interesting project with, for solar. And just pretty much was the turning point for me and said, Hey I’m dedicating my life to this and started an energy practice at IDEO.

That led me to my first sort of investing role, which was at Excel partners very successful venture capital firm, early investor in Facebook and many other very Successful tech ventures. Did cleantech with them back when cleantech kind of 1. 0 investing was hot and heavy and folks like coastline Kleiner and all the all these big Silicon Valley venture firms were dumping millions and millions of dollars into clean tech and we at Excel.

Kind of rode that wave, and we only did two investments in the two years I was there. One was Sunrun is now the number one residential solar company in the U. S. Probably the world and and then O-Power, which was a really cool software company that IPO and then end up. getting bought and integrated into Oracle’s utility software offerings.

Spent a number of years in solar at companies like SunEdison at a company called Solar Bridge, a startup that got bought by SunPower and ended up moving me back to Texas. And then last year, myself and a partner, Neal Dikeman, looked at the world and looked at what was going on in in clean tech and an energy and said, Hey, it might be a good time to start an early stage venture capital funds.

We launched energy transition ventures this year were early stage venture capital focused on. What we used to call clean tech were now calling energy transition or climate tech. These are all different world words for overlapping spheres of interest. And we’re off, off to the races.

We, we launched the fund in Q one this year and we’ve done a couple of investments and are out looking for more.

Silas Mähner: Awesome. Very cool. It’s, I think this is very interesting to me that you have an engineering background and then have ended up in this investment space. I think maybe, could you talk about that a little bit?

Because I think I’d be curious to learn if you have any context on the the past and how traditionally it works for finance people or investment firms in general versus what might be different with climate tech technologies and companies.

Craig Lawrence: Yeah. I think what made Excel interested in me was my Engineering background, right?

So I was originally brought in really to be the technical due diligence person at that firm. And so certainly having that engineering background helps a lot of the, a lot of the things going on. And I do apologize if you hear that.

Silas Mähner: No, no worries. I have a lot of podcasts.

Craig Lawrence: A lot of the, a lot of the, the stuff particularly going on in cleantech 1. 0 was very technical in nature right people were doing fundamental material science R& D. Whether it’s, in film, solar cells or new battery materials. And the traditional tech investors were reliant on other experts to help them evaluate that stuff, either from the semiconductor industry or whatever.

So that was originally my, my mandate. And so I had no investing or finance knowledge, right? I didn’t go to business school. I hadn’t done investing, hadn’t run a business. So I picked that up on the fly at Excel. I didn’t really realize this at the time, but Excel is one of the, probably the best one of the top best venture firms in the world.

And so I was learning from some of the best at it in the world. And so I, I feel very blessed and lucky to have had that experience and to be, watching how these folks operated. And Long, long rambling, answer to your question is I think it is still relevant today.

Many of the energy and climate investments have a kind of fundamental core technology that’s beyond, software, that you’re dealing with physics here, you’re, you are moving electrons around the real world. I recognize, my limitations, I developed expertise. I did a PhD and in a very specific area and have a lot of strong expertise in that area, but that rarely comes to bear in the specific deals we’re looking at. I think having an understanding of, what to look for and how to look at it and, continues to benefit me to this day.

But I had to pick up a whole new set of skills and frankly, why I partnered up with my partner Neal, who’s spent much more time in finance and has really focused all of his career in finance has really been help helpful for me and is a compliment.

Silas Mähner: Yeah. To me that seems like it’s a pretty interesting partnership because from what I’ve gathered again I’ve never spent any time in the finance space on that side of things, but seeing how people invest in tech companies where it’s about the team over the technology, because, hey, the tech, it’s just code, right? They can recode it to make things different to make it fit the needs of the customer.

But with climate tech, issues, it has to be good technology, right? If the technology is bad or it doesn’t work, then it’s entirely a waste of investment. You can always, stack different people around the tech as long as the tech is good. Is that something that you’d say is consistent with what you’ve seen?

Craig Lawrence: Yeah. And there’s a lot of great opportunities that really don’t have a fundamental technology. I think about my past investments. Sunrun is a financial innovation, right? And that was really important for solar. And, and I spent time at Sun Edison, who’s considered the pioneers of those financial innovations there.

There really wasn’t a technology there. Same with O-Power. O-Power built software. But, it wasn’t rocket science. It was more behavioral science really is where their innovation lives, and I think I tend to gravitate towards, these things that are more business model innovations where you really are looking at the team. The product, maybe not the technology and the market. And I think that’s where a lot of the opportunity lies. I think that’s where a lot of our investment will come in. There still is technology innovation needed and we, we have an investment that’s not been announced yet. So unfortunately, but it’s in the sort of power electronic space where, there is, it’s a real fundamental new technology and we invested because the team was extremely strong.

Technically, these are folks who had been in other power companies like and Antico Westinghouse and companies that have been with a long track records of being able to deliver, power products into the market. And, you just, you don’t necessarily trust something like that to someone fresh out of school.

Silas Mähner: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That brings us, to the question of kind of, is there a specific remit that you have at Energy Transition Ventures, or is there maybe a specific type of maybe it’s methodology or things that you look for maybe people who are interested in seeing if there’d be a good fit for what you guys are looking at?

Craig Lawrence: Yeah, I think, our remit is simple. We’re looking to back, category defining companies that are either driving Or benefiting from the transition of our energy economy off of fossil fuels and on to more sustainable sources. So within that remit, we are looking very broadly from a stage standpoint, we are, an early stage investor.

We’re looking we will do a person with an idea. We will invest at that early of a stage all the way through, potentially a later stage venture round where so I think that kind of canvas, it creates pretty open environment and I am very much. I want my funnel of the opportunities we see to be as large as possible within that remit, because, frankly, you can have a thesis, you can have themes that you’re focused on, but the end of the day you have to find compelling entrepreneurs who are building these companies and these businesses and these products.

And that’s really ultimately, you’re looking for that person, that team that is that is, built to be successful. Whether it’s in technology or marketing or sales or whatever element of it is that’s most needed. And we’re going to be opportunistic when those teams come around.

We’re going to want to back them. So like I said the The filter is very wide open. So encourage any anybody who even comes close to that remit to reach out to us.

Silas Mähner: Yeah, that makes sense. I think that that’s interesting perspective. I feel a lot of the funds nowadays have specific themes.

I’m not sure if there’s maybe reasons behind that, but I think it’s an interesting way to look at it, especially given your team set up because you’re able to really sort through those nicely.

Craig Lawrence: I would just add to that. I’m seeing that too. I’m seeing Kind of specialty funds like we’re a hydrogen fund or we’re a carbon capture fund.

And from my perspective I think that was too narrow. We thought about that. Our feeling and just based on my experience during the last wave of clean tech is, there weren’t a ton of very successful outcome. And I’m not sure this time will be that different.

I think there will be more. But I think I think you got to have a wide enough net to catch all those successful companies. I think we didn’t want to go too narrow. I think energy is narrow enough.

Silas Mähner: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think that there’s the, you obviously have to diversify what you’re doing in order to continue being successful, right?

Because this is something, maybe you could talk about this. I have, having been through maybe, what we call clean tech 1. 0. Could you talk about the mentality that had developed? Because I. My understanding is that it was people were like, Oh, we don’t want to touch that anymore because a lot of people lost their investment.

Is that the case, did people come around to that, or is it the case that a lot of these investments just didn’t have time to mature?

Craig Lawrence: I think the failures of cleantech 1.0, and by the way, I don’t think that there’s a lot of analysis, after the fact analysis looking back at the returns and it’s not as clear cut as you think to be like, Oh, that was a failure.

Tesla alone is such a hugely valuable company that it drives the overall returns for the whole sector. If you were in a few of the good companies you actually could have done that, very well. But I think the mistake that was made, the mistakes that were made in cleantech 1.0 are pretty simple to understand, and it was, go back to 2000. I don’t know whenever you think this cleantech 1. 0 started 2005, 2007, 2008, it peaked somewhere in that sort of 2005 to 2011, 12 timeframe. in terms of dollars invested. And what was going on back then? Solar was new. Wind was a little more mature, but still new. Batteries were new. E. V. S were new. And what did they all have in common? They were just very expensive, right? So solar wind, batteries, EVs, just the most expensive methods of producing electricity, right? Or using electricity. And but everyone saw promise and there were some subsidies that helped some of these things get to market. And there were some mandates and feed in tariffs. And that these markets were growing and they were clearly pointing to a very large opportunity. And so what did venture capital do?

They said this technology is expensive. We’re venture capitalists. We’re good. Let’s invest in ways to make these technologies cheaper. So tremendous amount of money going into thin film solar, a tremendous amount of money going into new battery technologies or materials, a tremendous amount of money going into biofuels.

And almost all of that was based on the current method of doing solar or batteries are ever too expensive to be viable. So we’re going to invest in something that has the promise to make it cheaper. Here’s the problem was those technologies: a lot of them were at what I would consider to be a fundamental R&D stage. They were in the lab, right? So you have venture capitalists funding fundamental R&D, which is just hard. It’s just hard and it’s expensive and it’s unpredictable. And there’s not much that the venture capitalists can do to accelerate that. They can try to throw more money at it, but that doesn’t necessarily accelerate it.

So you’re doing something very hard. And in the meantime, the stuff that was so expensive; silicon, solar cells, lithium ion batteries, wind turbines. They just kept getting cheaper and they kept getting cheaper faster than anyone predicted. And I can go pull up my decks from these thin film solar companies.

And they pitched me where they’re predicting where their costs are going to be and where the industry costs are going to be when they get to market. And they were just wrong. Their costs were higher. They got, they took longer to get to market because it’s fundamental R&D and the market just passed them by.

So, most of those investments failed because they mispriced the risks, the market risk, the technology risk

Today, we’re at a fundamentally different spot, which is those core technologies are now the cheapest way of producing electricity. So solar, wind and soon, if not now, batteries as storage for solar and wind or other forms of electricity are now just really fundamentally cheap. They’re fundamentally better products for a whole host of reasons and then the alternatives.

And so we’re in a different world. So now I look at it and why we started this fund, which is now. We can, now we know these markets are going to be huge because they’re economically driven, not subsidy driven, or just, we’d like to be clean driven. They’re just cheaper. So there’s going to be whole sets of industries and businesses built on top of these very, very inexpensive, clean electrons.

So that was the problem of Cleantech 1.0, I see it being repeated, unfortunately, in cleantech, whatever you call it, 2. 0, or climate tech, which is, people are looking at things like hydrogen and carbon capture, which are very expensive today and saying let’s go invest our venture dollars in R&D, in fundamental new science and technology to make them cheaper.

Look, I want to see investment in that fundamental R&D and science like I think it’s absolutely vital as it was during solar. But I just don’t know if it’s an appropriate use of venture capital dollars. The other thing that’s changed from then to now is back then it was only venture. That was it, like you had venture capital and there was no one to hand off those things to, right?

There was no growth capital. There was no private equity. There was no infrastructure capital. There was no corporate capital. There wasn’t the public markets really weren’t that interested in these things. So there was just no follow on capital. So you had venture capitals. venture capitalists funding the building of factories, right?

For, solar. Now it’s very different. You can’t open, you can’t open your browser if you follow the kind of accounts and news that I follow and not see the announcement of another like multi billion dollar fund, whether it’s an infrastructure fund or a growth fund or private equity fund or SPAC.

You just there’s now lots of capital up and down the stack to support these businesses, and that’s why we jumped into early stage capital. We said, Hey, look, there’s renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. There’s capital to support these young businesses as they grow. So let’s but there’s not a lot of early stage venture still.

I think, there’s more there’s less than there was, I suspect in clean tech 1.0.

Silas Mähner: Yeah, that makes sense to me. Cause I was actually curious about that, that given maybe people have a little bit of cold feet per se, because it was all of the early stage funds that kind of really took it badly in the first first round.

So it’s interesting that you guys are doing that, but it’s interesting that to hear your perspective too, that there is the infrastructure beyond the seed stage to, to help, take things to the next level. And obviously I think public opinion of these things has gone up. A lot. I’m curious, are there specific examples aside from, power generation, are there specific examples of other technologies that you’ve seen or invested in that just make more sense economically for the clients that they’re serving, whether those, whether it’s a building tech technology or something like that, are there any examples, because I’m always curious to share these examples with people so they can see the reason why this is so important for us to move in this direction.

Craig Lawrence: Yeah, I’ll give you an example. And unfortunately I the investment hasn’t been announced. So I’m going to be a little more vague than I would normally like to happy to come back on and give you more, but we we invested in a power electronics company. So the, these folks are solving a problem for first application they’re focused on is EV charging, DC fast charging, and you’ll hear. You’ll hear a lot when people talk about charging infrastructure, which is, oh, it’s expensive because you have to do grid upgrades, right? The grid is not built to deliver the kind of power to a site to charge a bunch of EVs simultaneously with 250 kilowatts of power each.

So you need to do grid upgrades, which by that, they mean typically you’re installing transformers, switch gear, inverters, safety protection. And this stuff is very expensive, right? You need to get permits. You need to lay a concrete pad, you’re trenching, you’re running conduit. And this ends up becoming, like in solar, they talk about soft costs, which is everything other than the panel you start to add up and become a substantial barrier to to e-charging. So we invested a company that’s still a really interesting technology leveraging sort of solid state transformer technology to significantly lower the size, cost, increase the efficiency of the grid infrastructure needed to deliver EV fast charging.

The obvious customers for this are fleets that are electrifying where, you’re, you’ve got a bunch of delivery trucks or a bunch of vehicles where, charging fast is important because it directly hits your bottom line. You’re gonna want, you’re gonna be building a lot of charging.

We’re going to be building a lot of charging infrastructure over the next decade. Amazon, UPS, Post Office, everybody who’s looking to electrify their vehicles would need a product like this. So we invested in an early stage technology company that’s doing some smart stuff around power electronics. It’s not fundamental R&D it’s engineering, right?

It’s engineering. It’s better engineering, better design. Of of this type of solution. And that’s an area we got excited about. And we made a very early bet at the seed stage in a good company doing this.

Silas Mähner: Yeah, that makes sense. There’s just so many examples.

I think that people have had on here where it’s a no brainer for companies to implement the technology because it saves them money, or maybe even adds some revenue streams to me. You mentioned this earlier, the new business models, to me, that’s very interesting. There’s so many, I feel it’s just not something a lot of people, some people, of course, but not a lot of people like think about, Oh, how can I innovate the way this is done?

And oftentimes that can be just a huge innovation itself and can just open up the market because it reduces the barriers. So that’s interesting to hear. What are. In your opinion, some of the areas that you see the most growth happening within this climate tech space over the next let’s say five to 10 years.

Craig Lawrence: Yeah, so where we’re we’re seeing, where I’m seeing growth. I think energy storage is. Is an underreported like tsunami coming and it’s not without risk. We just we just saw Chevy announced a full recall of the Chevy Bolt, right? Because of a battery defect issue. We saw a, kind of a thermal event, which is the battery way of saying, a fire at a stationary storage installation in California recently.

There, these things are not easy to do, but there’s 30 gigawatts of battery storage in the queue in ERCOT in Texas. These are projects that are in various stage of development or installation or connection to the grid. 30 gigawatts is a lot of power. Most of this is four hour lithium ion type battery storage.

There’s a equal, I don’t know the number offhand, but I think a greater amount in California that’s in development and I mean, there is no better power device on the grid than a battery. It is just Super flexible, highly controllable, fast, dynamic, multi-use really powerful thing to have on the grid.

And the cool thing about it is it’s scalable, right? You can have an individual small battery system in a home, to a large utility scale, multi gigawatt, multi megawatt, tens of megawatts installation. You can place it because it’s not, polluting and doesn’t need fuel and isn’t burning fuel and creating exhaust.

You can place it, in all kinds of interesting spaces where it’s needed on the grid. So that’s a huge area. I’m super excited about that and what that means for our ability to deploy more more renewables on the grid and then electric vehicles. Again, I think that’s a tsunami coming. I think it’s fits and starts. The this is the change in tone I’ve heard from the auto manufacturers from a decade ago when I talked to a Volkswagen executive who said, why would we do electric vehicles when we have diesel? Like diesel so much more efficient, right?

And why would we do hybrids when we have diesel so much more efficient? So it, and now it’s they basically saying they’re, they’re going to phase out fossil fuel engines and at some point and be all electric. So that’s super exciting. And then, this is where it all intersects, which is, I’m on the, I’m on the waiting list for electric Ford F 150, right?

And the reason I am is not because I want a truck. I’ve never had a truck in my life, but because they’re the first company that’s really promoted the vehicle grid concept. And, I live in Austin. I was out of power for a week earlier this year when we had the massive, snow apocalypse here and froze out our grid.

And I had no backup, right here I am. And I’ve been in this industry for 15 years. I got solar on my roof, but it’s grid tied solar. I had no backup. So I’m getting that F-150. It’s got a hundred watt-hour battery that can back my house up for a week that literally can back my house up for a week.

And I think that’s just a game changer. That’s just an absolute game changer.

Silas Mähner: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting one, especially because, from where I’m from a rural area in Wisconsin and typically you maybe the lower on the progressive end of things for new technologies per se, and, having conversations with my dad about, Hey, if you get a truck, like here’s the benefits of what you could get an electric truck.

For example, so that’s interesting to see. I’m curious, do you know of maybe kind of things or predictions you have given the increase in battery storage usage and how we’re going to be able to track all this data a lot better? Do you see any kind of big movements or things that you’re excited for, where data is going to be able to intersect with all of these things that we’re doing within the energy side of things?

Craig Lawrence: Yeah, definitely. And I think there’s so many cool innovative companies who are launching around. This is where I, what I get excited about. I think, I think whether it’s the tech world or the energy world, I’m looking for sort of ecosystems forming, right. And in solar and in Silicon solar, that there’s these huge ecosystems from supply and the supply chain downstream to developers and installers, and then technology companies that are trying to make these things work better, addressing soft costs and I’m seeing the same thing in the battery world, right? Everything from really cool companies that are working on, bat-testing and battery health and diagnostics, right? So that you can track battery performance either, from the factory through to into the car or into the stationary storage system. And, so much data being collected on these things to help, feedback and improve the product and the manufacturing to people focused on like second life use for batteries, right? So people figuring out how to take these for a car when a battery is at 80 percent capacity, you might not, it might be done for the car, right? Your range is diminished. Your performance might be diminished, but it’s been paid for and amortized and depreciated, and so to go stick that into a stationary storage system where maybe, size isn’t that important. And the fact that it’s, 70 80 60 percent of capacity, still perfectly usable.

And so I see so many different pieces and even everything like there’s a there’s companies that are like, developing, software and APIs to monitor and control EVs to, to basically, assess the value of the car and, again, you tie it back to the vehicle, the grid where the car becomes a resource for the grid.

And then there’s how you’re going to orchestrate and control all that. People have been talking about this for decades and it’s like just starting to happen, right? There were a lot of companies trying to do this back when I was at Excel. There was a company doing vehicle to grid, there were no electric cars hardly, right? There was no Tesla and hardly any cars that could do that. They were just too early with that idea, right? It’s maybe a little too early, right? Still, for Ford and Nissan, I think are the only companies that have even, made that capability available. Tesla hasn’t yet even, and they’ve got the most EVs on the road. You can’t back up your home with your Tesla. There are a lot of people who have a tesla sitting in their garage with 100 kilowatt hour battery, 90 kilowatt hour battery, but they need, like, 13, 14 kilowatt hours to back up their house.

With that fully charged EVs there in the garage and unused,

Silas Mähner: yeah, that’s interesting. If it, once this is implemented, I never actually thought about that concept, but if once it’s implemented the power outages that you guys experienced in Texas, for example, if enough people had this ability to just plug into their truck, for example It would have probably saved a lot of headache for a lot of people and a lot of pain and suffering.

This interesting concept. That’s a new one for me. What about your. journey, whether it’s, your entire career or maybe specifically so far with ETV, what have been the biggest surprises to you, the things that you just did not expect?

Craig Lawrence: That’s a really good question. I feel like I’ve had a lot of surprises, right? The falling into venture it during cleantech 1.0 just was never on my roadmap. At all of things to do. And I remember I had the job offer from Excel.

It was a short term offer. I was, had this job at IDEO, which, probably not well known in Wisconsin, but IDEO was one of those places, one of the most desirable places to work. And and I’m like, God, am I going to really leave this job? And I just I just took a leap of faith and jumped in.

And The whole thing was shocking. Still to this day, I’m amazed at how Venture Capital works and just the movement of money from LPs to GPs, to startups. It feels inefficient, all the time I think about it. I’m excited to be doing what I’m doing and thankful every day I get to do it.

But on the other hand, it’s, it just seems odd of how this money gets to the startups through such a torturous path, right? And to be a gatekeeper in that path is a is a daunting position. I will say I’m shocked at how practical I’ve become.

I viewed myself in my engineering phase of my career as a dreamer. And so every time I see a funding announcement for someone’s invested 100 million in nuclear fusion or some crazy new storage technology or whatever. I’m like, I would have thought that would have been me early in my career.

But the reality is I get much more excited about opportunities that have, can have immediate impact. And companies like Sunrun and O-Power when we did it, companies we’re invested in today. They are either already out in the market making an impact or really close.

And so I find that immediate satisfaction of being able to see what I’m working on and what I’m involved in having impact right away versus grinding it out in the lab for many years is I’m surprised because I did a Ph.D, I spent four years in the lab working on one thing, right? To see it finally come to fruition at the end of that time.

And so I thought that was who I was. I think I need a lot more instant gratification.

Silas Mähner: That’s interesting. That’s yeah, I can never, I don’t think I could be the person who sits on one thing for a long time, but that’s interesting to hear your perspective of how it’s changed. I think it’s interesting also that we obviously need both, right?

We need a little bit of both because if there’s nobody dreaming up the next things, then We’re never going to have the next thing. So that’s interesting. Maybe just a couple more things here. What have you seen in terms of with the portfolio companies you’re working with, or just maybe companies you’ve seen in general? How have you seen them having to find talent? Because I’ve talked to a lot of people have issues with There’s no education per se that’s helping get people into these paths, these career paths that are really meant for these new technologies, because it’s just unknown to the universities. And obviously universities are typically a couple of years behind the trend.

So I’m just curious, what have you seen there? What have been the challenges and maybe what’s being done to, to change that in the future?

Craig Lawrence: There’s a few. The talent is definitely an issue. There’s the issue with young talent, people coming out of school or, people come into this industry. I think there’s a I think there’s some gaps and holes there. But before I talk about that, the talent area that’s hitting me directly. Because I am seeing a lot of smart people from other industries want with the desire to get into this industry. I think it’s great. And I think there’s a lot of people moving into it.

One of the thing that I see lacking right now is senior experienced, executive talent. Available for these startups. Some of the best executives that I met along the way, during the 15 years I’ve approached a number of them to join some of these startups were funding saying, Hey, we’ve got a really cool technical team, whatever, but they, they could really benefit from someone who’s done it before, who’s taken a company from A to B and had an exit and whatever.

And, Many of them are like, I’m not, I’m I’m past that, I’ve aged out of the startup the startup world. I think that’s a shame. I’d actually like to see senior folks who have done it before maybe they’re even financially set, right? Maybe they don’t need the money or the big exit, but to go back and to and to work in these sort of more entrepreneurial startup companies.

So that’s where I’m seeing a big gap. And then on the sort of, that are trying to train people both in entrepreneurship and in climate. So, I think that’s pretty healthy actually. I think that there’s a lot of that going on. Universities are creating climate programs, degrees, entrepreneurship and I’m pretty bullish on all that stuff that’s happening there.

Silas Mähner: Yeah, that’s interesting to hear because I’ve heard different things depending on how crazy the technology is that it’s just tough to find people because, the engineers are looking for that have the correct motivations and everything. Maybe they have, they were headed in a different path and they have to be convinced to change that path because it’s just new technology, so that’s interesting to hear.

Maybe one other thing along this line is. As a lot of these technologies transition, we’re obviously going to be replacing some of our existing infrastructure or just the way we do things. What do you see as happening to the current workforce and are there any things that you’re seeing that’s being done to help get that workforce up to run into the new into this new technology so that way there’s not really so much of a gap because this is a big concern from a lot of rural areas like people have kind of. Typical blue collar jobs and they’re like, Hey, how can we, how are we going to be involved in this transition? We don’t want to be out of work.

Craig Lawrence: Yeah it’s this, it’s been an ongoing topic. Going back, it’s Hey, when we started to, it was very clear that the country had turned against coal, going back more than 10 plus years and and that there was going to be an issue with people in the coal industry in those states that and I don’t think we did a good job of sort of creating opportunities. Because frankly, those states aren’t where the opportunities were in renewables really.

West Virginia and, And some of those places in Pennsylvania really weren’t big renewables states, right? That was going on in California and Massachusetts. And you’re really going to up and a lot of this stuff is you got to be there, right? This isn’t remote work kind of work. It’s I’m turning a wrench or I’m I’m digging a, I’m digging a trench, right? So I think it’s interesting now that places like Texas have become a renewable development stronghold. Solar, wind and storage. Texas is one of the biggest states. Texas is also one of the biggest oil and gas states, right?

Craig Lawrence: So I think that opportunity to transfer talent at the engineering, the construction level, the operations and maintenance level I think it’s, I think it’s big. I think there’s a bit of a stigma. We’re a little bit, the sort of new energy people are a little bit dismissive of the old energy people.

I think that’s horrible. I think that the energy industry, the oil and gas industry those folks are the original risk takers, the original entrepreneurs in this country, really. Like they, These are people taking risks on business technology development and they’re also smart, right? From everywhere from the technical and the blue collar all the way up to the finance people and private equity people. These folks are smart. They’re sophisticated. Would love to have their energy turned towards this renewable buildout that we’re encouraging here.

And I don’t have the answer. I don’t know. I don’t know how much of it’s happening. I just do know that that there’s been some dismissiveness that I think is a shame.

Silas Mähner: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think it was back in. I think it was back shortly after the ERCOT disaster that I stumbled into a clubhouse room.

And I just heard, I think I thought it was a renewable energy clubhouse room, but it turned out to be mostly oil and gas folks and it was interesting to hear their perspective on how They felt like people on our side of things, if you want to say it, our side per se, we’re just really dismissive or just didn’t care, to bring them in because I think that’s a good point.

You mentioned that they were the first innovators. So I think that maybe people listening, if maybe check your LinkedIn comments, how are you sharing this? Because this is obviously. They do have talent. We need to be aware of bringing those people in. And it may be for hiring managers.

I’ve seen this as a recruiter too, that hiring managers tend to be like, hey, I only want people who already have the experience. Whereas who knows, maybe sometimes it’s going to be better off to have somebody who has the context from the other types of roles. But awesome. This has been great. I think we’re out of time now.

Just curious if you have any final thoughts that you want to wrap up with.

Craig Lawrence: Yeah, I would say this. I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been. Like I said, I got excited back when all this stuff was a pipe dream, really. It was a heavily subsidized, expensive experiment, putting solar on people’s roofs or on buildings or in solar farms and building wind turbines. And I just, I don’t know how it seems to the rest of the world because I can only, know my perspective, but it has come so far, so fast.

And I just, I think it’s, I think it’s underreported, right? Like I think, A lot of the conventional wisdom is still what is talked about, right? And we talked about the sort of, potential animosity between the traditional energy, oil and gas world and the new energy world. I live it. I’m on, I’m on, I’m very active on Twitter, @clawrence, if anyone wants to find me. And I’m in these communities there’s these very strong communities of oil and gas folks that I’ve stumbled into. And I find myself in, anything from polite discussions to Twitter wars over, over renewables. And, but like that, those people, and I think they are reflective of the broader population have some notions about renewable energy, wind, solar, batteries, that is 10 years plus out of date. And 10 years ago, it was true. And it’s not today. And I think there’s an education process. The media, we are all responsible for helping people understand that it’s not your 2010 solar and wind industry. It’s a whole different ballgame now. And so I’m super excited about where we are.

I in my mind, it’s very clear. It’s all going to change. We are going to transition off fossil fuels. I know it’s going to be faster than people are projecting. I don’t know how fast, I think a lot depends on what we all do, right? The investments we all make. In people and technology and products in policy that, that are going to make the difference.

So I will wake up every day, excited and just, try to do my part.

Silas Mähner: Awesome. Very good. I’m glad to hear the excitement from somebody who is holding the purse strings and can see it from that level. So very good. I appreciate you coming on the show, Craig. We’ll definitely, we’ll have to have you on in the future, especially as you announce more investments.

As we see this energy transition take place.

Craig Lawrence: Yeah, we’d love to be back on. You should definitely grab my partner, Neal, too. He’s a fun character to have on these things.

Silas Mähner: So awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode. Really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Craig.

I really enjoyed speaking with him every time I do get the chance to connect with him. So again, hope you found a lot of value. Please do share your thoughts on what you thought of the podcast. Any questions you’d answered, let us know. Asked in further episodes, I will have a num, a number of other financial professionals in the space in the near future.

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