Julie Blane & Carmel Rafaeli of The Table

Julie Blane and Carmel Rafaeli are the Founding Partners of The Table, "a community of investors at the intersection of Climate and Diversity, focused on increasing the amount and frequency of investment into climate ventures where there is at least one woman on the co-founding team". 

Both have an extensive background in venture capital and early stage investing. They have used that to create a new kind of organisation, The Table, which "enables investors and founders to close funding rounds smarter, faster and bolder through convening diverse and global networks along the early stage ecosystem".

This conversation is for anyone who wants to know more about investing in climate-related start-ups. If you find the Venture Capital process a mystery and its jargon confusing, then this is the podcast for you.

Just some of the things we cover:

-Unpacking the jargon, including: Angel Investor; Pre-seed, Seed and Series A funding rounds; DeepTech; concessionary capital; ticket; and more.

-The Table definition of 'sustainability': healthy ecosystem producing a pipeline of innovations; those innovations reducing the greenhouse gas emissions and protecting life; and, the businesses with those innovations are successful.

-Deciding to support incremental changes as well as radical innovations, because there is just so much to be done on climate.

-How they spotted that there were women-led teams with ideas, but then not getting funds, because those teams didn't know how to access the funds. The Table  exists to address that problem. This market innovation is a competitive advantage, as The Table gets to looking at innovations which other investors don't see. All this, plus contributing to gender equality as well.

-The Table is also innovating by assembling a community which is a wide 'capital stack', meaning there are investors who invest at each maturity stage. This means that it is easier for a company to access the right funding for its stage.

-The Table has yet another innovation, a foundation which provides non-dilutive, recoverable grants to companies, when their success path needs more patient funding. 

• 'Non-dilutive' means that the current owners having their shareholdings reduced (which is important for fundraising and incentives later).
• 'Recoverable' means that, if the company does indeed succeed in pre-defined ways, then they will pay back the grant. So, it is like long-term forgivable debt.

-How the venture capital world has got used to the returns that come from digital technologies which have enourmous network effects, and therefore can have vastly outsized returns compared to anything else, including climate tech. 

-In the conversation, I refer to some research I did on climate innovation hubs. You can read the findings here.

This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

David,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 0:07

hello. This is one of several interviews for the students studying the MSc in sustainable resources at UCL. My name is David bent, and I'm an honorary lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable resources. I'm also the CO lead for a module on innovation and sustainability in business. Most of the course gives people the latest academic theory and insight. These 30 minute interviews are with practitioners to give some of the grit under the thinking fingernails, even of innovating for sustainability today, I'm very glad to say we're joined by Julie Blaine and Carmel Raffaelli, who are both Family Partners of the table. Hello, Carmel and Julie.

Julie Blane: 0:44

Hello. So let's start off with the obvious question, what is your role and what is your organisation? So, Julie, let's start with you. Thank you. Thank you very much for having us on the table. Is a community of funds who co invest in women led climate tech startups. Carmel and I launched this just less than a year ago, and it came as a result of us working together, co investing together as angels, and yeah, we saw a tremendous opportunity for funding climate innovation in a different kind of way, especially at the early stage where money really matters, of that and supporting women and women entrepreneurs, specifically on this path. Cool and then Carmel, perhaps you could unpack for our audience some of the jargon terms in there. So what does it mean to be a fund? What is what is a fund? I know that's a seemingly obvious question, but not everyone will know what

Carmel Rafaeli: 1:43

you mean. When we refer to funds, we're referring to venture capital funds. These are organisations that raise money from other individuals and manage that money invested into high risk, high reward innovation, usually tech based companies, and it's a type of gambling. So you do your research, and you try to make sure that out of the company you invest in, at least one or two will return your fund with a nice return to your investors.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 2:18

Yeah. So a fund will get money from a range of different people who are all willing to take the risk. It'll invest in 1015, different organisations, companies of which two or three will be might be spectacularly successful, and that pays for the whole rest of it. And that's the way in which capitalist economies take risk, is that they fund these very early stage things. And just for clarity, does the path have its own fund, or does the path help other funds to find opportunities? Which way around? Is it the table? You mean? Yeah, the table. Sorry,

Carmel Rafaeli: 2:52

yeah. So the table has actually a joint way of working. So on the one hand, the investors in our community bring the deals forward. That's the core of what we do. We ask our members to bring deals that they're actively investing in that are within our criteria. So BC, to a at least one female founder holding substantial equity, doing anything that is climate positive. And then, on the other hand, because Julie and I are very much part of the ecosystem, we're angel investors. We're out there. We're vocal. We get a lot of deal flow ourselves. We review it, and if we believe it's strong enough, then we will also offer that to the members of the community.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 3:40

Great. And so Julie, I come back to you for some other of those terms, which are very common in your world, but less common for everybody else. Angel what is an angel investor?

Julie Blane: 3:51

An angel investor is an individual who has some cash to invest in a startup, and that cash can be the last few years, there's been an emergence of opportunities for 1000 pounds, 2000 pounds, 5000 pounds, traditionally, angel investing has been in the 10s of 1000s of pounds, but there's ways to make angel investing more accessible to people with different levels of cash available. These cash investments are highly risky. Don't return any kind of upside, but an angel will invest in a startup because they can see the vision that the founder has, believes in what the outcome will bring, and perhaps can also help build the company in many different ways. So an angel investor is somebody who comes in early in a startup's journey, has some compassion that they can put in, and hopefully some. Some other time and resources

David Bent-Hazelwood: 5:03

along the way cool. And then the other thing that Carmel just said, which would be great to have an explanation from you, pre seed to Series A, what does that mean?

Julie Blane: 5:12

So pre seed, seed and series A are labels that are put on startups at different stages that they're at. So there's lots of different parameters based on jurisdictions. So a pre seed company in raising funds in the United States may raise a larger round than UK or Europe. That's for other sort of macroeconomic reasons, but overall, in general, the way I think about it, and happy for Carmel to chime in, too, the way I think about pre seed is like, you've just got this idea, you've got perhaps a path to minimum viable product. You've got a hunch about what the market size and opportunity could be. You're testing out your go to market strategy, and whether you're at seed and post seed pre Series A, you're getting more traction on that. You're developing more milestones. For me, series A means, like, right? You sort of got the semblance and the idea of how you're going to scale this. And so series A seems to be like first grade to me, like kindergarten, very creative play. I love the pre seed to series A because it's very creative. It's very iterative and full of hope and possibility, great.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 6:36

And typically, if you're going for Series A, you've already had your first sales, so you have some proof and some traction precede not so much. Oh, no, maybe I've got that wrong. Carmel will now correct me.

Carmel Rafaeli: 6:48

But for climate, that does not necessarily Okay, is that it would not necessarily be true, yes, for climate, because of the kind of innovations we're talking about, a lot of them can be hardware. A lot of them might be about science. It is hard to adjust the regular lingo and mindset of the VC world into climate. That's part of the challenge that we have and where innovation is required. And so yes, theoretically, you would want to see sales for a rounds, but many times you'll only have off takes, which is kind of a contract on buying something in the future, assuming everything goes well, kind of thing. But even that won't necessarily be true. It depends on how deep tech we're referring to. Yes,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 7:39

and in that. I mean, this is a world which, as listeners are finding out, has its own language, including deep tech, which is as common was saying where you're is, as I understand deep tech, it's where you're making physical things which are new to the world, therefore complicated and difficult to prove they're going to work in advance, often quite big. In particular in the climate world, climate tech world, and therefore they take a lot longer to bring to market and to be successful and to get a return on, compared to digital businesses or software businesses, where you can test them in the world relatively straightforwardly, you can revise them, and you can do that all with people and computers, rather than having to build a new thing from scratch, which has never been built before, which is what you're trying to

Carmel Rafaeli: 8:28

do with deep tech, yes, and also very, very small things. So going to the other side of it, of the enzymes, or whatever kind of very scientific innovation that can affect things that are large scale, but be very small actually.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 8:44

Yeah. And folks can go back to a previous episode with Beverly Gower Jones, where she talked about her establishment of the clean Growth Fund, which was very much aimed at that deep tech building a big thing for the first time, kind of, that's the what her fund is for. Let's move on into your roles in the organisation. So Carmel, what does Founding Partner mean? Why partner? Why not just founder

Carmel Rafaeli: 9:12

interesting. We went back and forth. We defined ourselves for a while. It's kind of a combination between two worlds. So on the one hand, the people is a community. It's an ecosystem. It's very much a startup of itself. On the other hand, it is interacting in the investment world. We're talking about partners. Managing partners is much more the kind of lingo that is used. So Julie and I are equals in generating this idea and bringing it to life, and we are founding it from the ground up. Our second stage is that we are building a foundation that will provide non dilutive, recoverable growth. Months to the companies that are shared by the investors at the community. There's a lot of other words to unpack, but in that it is a financial tool, and so it was important for us to utilise also the lingo from that world in the description of what we do, because

David Bent-Hazelwood: 10:18

typically in the venture capital world, you'll have general partners, managing partners, managing partners, limited partners. So that partner lingo, as you say, is there? I wonder if we'll come, shall we hold the foundation as one of the story, innovation stories? And I'll ask you at that point to unpack that, the particular conditions around that, because, of course, as we're hearing, there's lots of specificity here. And Julie, the next question is, how is sustainability framed in your organisation? We've already heard at least two parts to that climate positive. And then there's, there's a gender angle to do with the founding team. So what does sustainability mean to the table?

Julie Blane: 10:59

Yes, sustainability for me is, I guess, on three different layers. One is the structure of the table, as a partnership, as a community, as a collaborative, as a collaborative, collaborative partner in the ecosystem is ensuring the sustainability of climate tech deal flow from founders to investors and the other way around, and from investors to investors, there is also the sustainability of the underlying innovation. So for us, climate positive outcomes and the sustainability that comes from that sustainability for the the life on land, for life underwater, looking at some of those sustainable development goals that talk about sustainability for our our our world, our planet, but also for the the sustainable business models. So like in in business school and in business model development, you want a sustainable business model. You want a business model that's going to create value and returns for all of your stakeholders, for your customers, for your employees, for your investors, but making sure that a company is sustainable while it's creating sustainable outcomes. These are different ways that I think about that word usage. And of course, having gender equity and equal gender participation is critical, right? Women are half of, if not more than half of the planet, the population, women are often a at the at the receiving end of climate impacts, more adversely than other parts of it, of the community and and so having women both lead venture ventures that Have climate outcomes, but also that are involved in the investment track. So throughout we talk a little a little bit about gender, but actually it's a lot of of the of the frame of we're talking about in terms of being a sustainable outcome has to be sustainable for everybody involved.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 13:20

Cool and there's sometimes I wish that I could get rid of the sustainability word, just like I could get rid of the strategy word, because then require people to use different terms, because you you've there got talked about deal flow and a healthy ecosystem by which new technologies, new ventures, make their way from wherever somebody thought them up, out into being funded. So there's sort of sustainable deal flow. There is sort of more dynamic and enduring. You've got the sustainable outcomes of having those businesses if they're successful. Those technologies, when they scale, reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we produce. Protect life on land, protect life on water, underwater. And then there was a final sustainable thing you said there, which was about sort of commercial success, like the business itself will be enduring and growing, and in that sense sustainable because it's generating value for its shareholders, its staff, its customers, its suppliers, its communities and so on, all those stakeholders that are around it. So Carmel, just on climate positive. Does the path have a threshold about what's climate positive enough? Like? Are we looking at Tiny improvements? Is enough? Or is there a level at which you go, No, this is the thing, which is this counts as climate positive because it's making a larger contribution work. Can you impact what climate positive means a bit more?

Carmel Rafaeli: 14:48

Yes, of course. So for us, we talk about direct and substantial positive outcomes for bent people and. Um animals, some we add at times. And so this can be different approaches for solutions to hardware, software that big tech, biotech, robotics, and it can be about decarbonization. It can be about circularity, water agriculture, we made the decision that we require the ventures, the companies that are coming to the table, to decide what their impact KPIs are, and in that case, it allows us to review it and decide if it fits or it doesn't fit, but it's mostly about knowing that they have a direct linkage between what they do, what they're building, their business model, and positive outcomes. Part of what Julie and I believe in, and what the table represents, is that we need to think about our investments in climate differently. And it's not about how we positioned the funds earlier that they're looking for those 123, home runs. It's more about big and small steps towards a bent better solutions. And so it actually is important for us to implement, to support companies that potentially are doing incremental changes alongside the huge ones. And so within the platform, we have companies that are working on new dyes from food waste and new materials for fashion with space technology for decarbonization and new batteries, and kind of anything in between, because it is critical to continuously support approaching the challenges from all directions. And that is part of the diversity as well, because diversity of thought will bring diversity, diversity of solutions, which today we're just not getting enough of.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 17:09

Yeah, and I think that that diversity point is really crucial. If we're going to have industrial revolutions on a deadline, then we need to be exploring the width of that frontier of possibility in order to find the things that work, some of which will be small, some of your big. And also, it can be difficult to know in advance whether what you think will be a big bang will actually have a big bang, or something you think might be incremental might turn out to have a big bang in the end, because it just can be diffused all around. Julie, I want to come back to you on the final part of this about that diversity. I suppose there's a challenge historically within the funding and VC sector, that it's quite dominated by people who went to particular universities and who are male and who are white, and that a lot of it has been about contacts. And so there's been a sort of self fulfilling prophecy, where those who went to Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, or in the US, I don't know, MIT, Sanford, Stanford, they tend to be the ones who become the entrepreneurs, then the angels, then the VC. And they all recognise each other, and they all fund each other the path as, I sorry the table, don't know why. I've got paths on my mind. There we are. The table was sort of set up to get outside of that problem, as I understand it, like talk to us a little bit about your experience of those frustrations, and therefore into why you created the table.

Julie Blane: 18:39

Thanks. Yeah, it's a really important, because it's a confluence the different factors. VC investing is changing, and the VC landscape is going through a transition of its own. It's it is recognised that there are biases in the investment process and barriers for this healthy, sustainable pipeline to flow. So looking at some of the data points, VC investing has gone to more that male led teams than any other type of leadership teams, and there has been consistently over the last several years that data has been measured 2% of venture capital. Some years, less than 2% of all venture capital investing has gone to women led teams. That is unacceptable, considering the level of of pipeline that is going in should yield far greater types of investment opportunities. So there are a number of initiatives, like new venture. Sure capital programme like future VC and many other initiatives to understand how changing and being more inclusive in VC investing and open up opportunities for understanding what should be invested. Can be invested in, pardon me, can look very different than it has traditionally. So the table sees, pardon me, a large number of pipeline opportunities, from Venture builders, from accelerators. Sorry, I'm just going to grab a sip of water. How? Here, where our partnerships with accelerators and incubators, the 40% women coming on their cohorts, 50% 60% so there is gender diversity at the ideation stage, at this pre seed stage, but not so much in the portfolio companies or the opportunities that VC funds are seeing. And we believe it's not because of a lack of pipeline, but a lack of knowledge about where to access this pipeline. And so the table is built specifically with the gender lens of saying in order for a deal to be brought to the table and shared amongst the investors. At least one of the co founders of the venture is identifying as a woman, and this helps us both to present to the investors in the community that there is a robust pipeline across lots of sectors and geographies, and allows the founders who from different backgrounds and or may not have had the types of access networks at universities or because they don't work at VC funds now, etc, all That kind of warm introduction atmosphere that has been a exclusive and exclusionary at times. To say to founders, here is a community investors who want to and look for and make the intention to consider women led and women co led deals. So it's, I think, the the macro view of how VC investing is changing, how awareness of the the bias that exists within the VC ecosystem and be broken or unlearned, and specific models like The table that is bringing to the fore opportunities without concessionary capital. We are not talking about about models here that that are different from a VC trajectory, but are more inclusive and its approach.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 22:55

Yeah, and concessionary capital would be where you the investor is saying, I don't mind if there's a lower return than a commercial rate. So what you're saying is, these are all commercial these are all Commercial Investments. There's no There's no like investments, and

Julie Blane: 23:12

I absolutely they may create that return over a longer period of time. So if you know a VC fund is expecting outside returns within a short amount of time, maybe these outside returns will be over a longer period of time, or maybe, as karma was explaining before, these are incremental steps that, over time, will will create a return that will look different from what a, you know, software only solution would look Like. And

David Bent-Hazelwood: 23:41

in a way, there's a way. Sorry, go on, come on.

Carmel Rafaeli: 23:44

Just to add that, part of the diversity is also bringing different financing players into the community. So having both syndicates that bring together angels, it's a tool for angels to invest together, so it makes it simpler for the founder to work with. But those are much smaller tickets. They usually come earlier on, so bringing them together with different stage funds and different size funds, together with family offices and CVC, the corporate venture arms, and in that way, there's different perspectives that come together and share the deal to help create this traction where usually there is not a lot of alignment or communication between the different groups. Yeah,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 24:35

and just to unpack a little bit of the jargon in there, ticket here means how much is so much jargon in this world, but there's every different profession has its own jargon, but it's very particular. Here. Ticket is the amount of investment that an investor would make on a particular round. So it might be 10,000 pounds, or it might be 50,000 or 100,000 or whatever. That's the ticket size, as it's called, and it's one of the, I mean, we've we've already started into the innovation stories. Um, even before I've asked you the questions, because what you're describing there is lining up different kinds of investors who can support a venture at different maturity stages, when their requirements and the risk and scale that an investor is willing to make are different, and therefore you have angels and their syndicates, which pool their risk and make it easier for an individual angel to spread themselves across different investments right at the early stage, because they're the ones willing to take the most risk, and then the more institutional investors, the further down the pipe they've got. They want things that are already gaining traction and scaling up, and they are willing to put in more money, and they have more money to be able to put in so to have an ecosystem which can fund each part of that journey makes it so much easier for the venture to scale. And then I think, let us then I think the other thing I wanted to say, actually was the other innovation that you've already spoken about, even without me asking you for your story on innovation was in the Masters module, we use an OECD way of categorising innovation, which starts with product innovation, making your widget or your software process innovation, how you make your widget. And then the third is market innovation, or marketing innovation, which is how you position your widget. In this case, you don't have a widget. You have a method, or the venture capital. And the marketing innovation here is the underserved market. Is those organisations, those businesses, which are co founded by women. Up until this point, they've not been able to they've been excluded deliberately, or otherwise from the world of being funded you, being the entrepreneurs that you are, you turned that problem into an opportunity. What if you were to serve that market? What if you were to get those companies which have female co founders, they got more financing and were being able to be more successful? Wouldn't that make for greater returns for you, and also a world in which more of the things that need to be done are being done. How fantastic. So it's greatly interesting and great to hear that. Let's move in to innovation stories. Can you tell us a story of a good example of your work, which is innovation for sustainability? Perhaps this might be the time to talk about the foundation, for instance,

Carmel Rafaeli: 27:23

yeah, so I think two two things that are innovative here. One is the community and the bringing together of the different investors. We call it the capital stack, right? And, and in order to for climate, this collaboration is extremely, extremely important to help finance the whole capital stack, the whole innovation. So bringing together the angels, the early stage investors, the later stage investors, the corporate the debt allocators that help finance, especially when we are doing hardware, real life, things to talk together, to collaborate. That's something we all talk about, but not a lot of people bring it all together. And the one thing that is missing in this capital stack, and that is where the foundation comes into play. Is what role can philanthropy have within financing and helping to support the growth, maturity and scale up of climate innovation? And so the table foundation is the second part of what the table does, and Julie and I launched the work on that officially about two months ago, where the foundation is meant to receive donations philanthropy and use those donations so we're not giving back money to the people that are putting money into The Foundation. We're giving them back impact KPIs or other climate KPIs, but we were not providing finances that taking that philanthropic capital and utilising it to capitalise the growth of the collaboration, of the climate innovation and of the diversity of founders, and in that way, we structured an innovative financing tool that were unable to do that. And that tool is, you can think about it as long term forgivable debt. So we provide support at no at very little cost at the end of the day to the founder exactly when they need it, so that they can make the decisions of how and when to use the money to help them grow faster, bigger, smarter,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 29:56

without going into the technical terms and well and my. Now is an okay time to use the technical terms, because you've explained it. So earlier you said, what was it? Non recoverable? Something grant, I missed the middle word. What was the phrase

Carmel Rafaeli: 30:11

non dilutive, recoverable grants, which means that we don't take equity. We're not taking a piece of the company, so we're not diluting the founder their ownership stakes and the grant. It's like receiving grants that, as we know, but it is recoverable under specific terms. So as the company grows, gets revenue, starts to become profitable, they can repay the money to the foundation, and we do it very, very comfortable terms for them, and then as we get the money back, we can start supporting another venture. So we have a sustainable model in ourselves, which is an evergreen so it circulates. Yeah.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 30:58

Wonderful. Thank you for explaining the job in terms of all of that as well, this which is great to hear, I think, on Have you had your first grantees or your first distributions of that foundation? Yet?

Julie Blane: 31:13

Yes, one of the great things about this community is so far so good, right? It seems it works. We've onboarded more than 250 funds from around the world. The community has shared over 40 deals, and of those 12 companies have closed their rounds. And that has that flywheel effect, that sort of that that collaborative effect has indicated to us that there are companies who are now eligible to receive these grants, these recoverable grants, philanthropic loans. There's other ways that we could use the jargon, but the idea being that we do have from this collaborative model an opportunity to to really help these ventures grow.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 32:04

Are you allowed to say any of the ones that have received or they're on the candidates for these grants, or any of the companies that have received those funding rounds? Or is that too confidential to be able to share? Or maybe it's too complicated for our story here as well. I

Carmel Rafaeli: 32:20

think it will just take some time.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 32:21

Okay, right? Fair enough. And I just want to emphasise the first part of your story there, Carmel, as well, about having the capital stack that is able to support the whole journey of venture. I did some research a few weeks ago on what would be needed for a climate innovation hub to be successful, and I asked my friends and my networks to hugely the main feedback was, don't just throw innovations out into the world. Make sure you you can scale them. Make sure you can grow them. Make sure you listen to the marketplace of what's needed. And so that joined upness, which takes things, not just from a concept to the first sale, but then from that first sale on into scaling and having a capital stack which can support that whole journey is massively, massively needed. Is there any other innovation story about the setting up of the path? And said it again, the table of the table, or any other aspects, other things you're doing which are innovative, which you'd like to fill out for us and give us as a story. I mean, it's a lot. I'm just checking. I just want to make sure, if you've got another story. If not, we can move into the next thing, which is about any methods and practices you use. Do you have a way to do you have like things like agile or lead startup? Are there ways in which you organise your the way you do your innovation, so that you can do it well? So both of you are nodding. So who would like to who would like to take this one on, Julie, perhaps for you.

Julie Blane: 34:03

Carmel has led the technology innovation for for this collaborative effort, so I'll let her to speak about that.

Carmel Rafaeli: 34:15

I was smiling because I'm allergic to all the jargon and others. In the end, I think, like the companies we work with, and actually a lot of the investors in our community, we're trying to utilise the innovations that are through the pipeline to work as efficiently and agile as possible, to continuously change and upgrade to be able to also treat so many so at a metrics of 250 investors, and we have, as Julie said, about 40 companies that were brought to the table, but another 50 that we brought. To the table ourselves. So the metric of about 100 to 250 is a complicated thing to work on. So we are continuously refining the methods that we're working with. We're utilising AI, we're utilising no code platforms that will enable us to do it at a very low cost, and we are making tonnes of mistakes on the way. Very forgiving community that shows that there is a true need to what we're doing that is helping us figure it out along the way

David Bent-Hazelwood: 35:36

cool. And then, as we move into our final few minutes, what's the biggest challenges you've faced, and how have you overcome them? Judy, perhaps, seeing as Carmel took the last question there,

Julie Blane: 35:48

there are enormous challenges. I always like to think of the glass hassle. So the challenge of how to shift a funding mindset from Oh, this climate tech company doesn't fit into the VC model, to saying, Okay, let's diversify the types of funding that we can get. Like so for me, the those challenges are there, or the challenge of saying, Oh, I love to invest in more women, but we just don't see enough women pitch and saying, Well, here's a here's a pipeline of 100 companies that you could look at. So I think that the challenges are there, but building, building community, building partnerships and collaboration to say, like, Hey, this is a problem we want to solve. We want to get more climate solutions out there. We want to make sure women are included. Let's solve it together. Means that, yeah, everybody's rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck in Yes, and

David Bent-Hazelwood: 36:44

I think it's worth emphasising for our listeners that I want to be a little bit harsh here, but there's a way in which the venture capital world, which in huge extent, grew out of Silicon Valley, has become addicted to the kinds of returns you get with runaway network effect. Digital behemoths like Facebook and Google and so on, which at one point were small but grew hugely and fast and also effectively a kind of monopoly, and therefore give super sized returns. Those may be one in 100 year kind of innovations and investments, compared to climate, which is a more like if you're, if you're, if it's a factory or something like that, then you're going to have a different kind of return. But if you become addicted to the digital network effect, scale monopoly returns, everything else doesn't look as good, even though it is necessary, and also is good for your returns in the medium and long term. So that addicted may be a strong word, but that would be a way of putting it across

Carmel Rafaeli: 37:45

to people. I'll just say that the best investment firms are not the ones that are doing VC, but PE, which is private equity. And in the end, the real returns and the long term stability and the big numbers are usually actually in real world solutions and taking problems that exist that your innovation and vision enable you to turn them around into bigger businesses. And so we have. There's so much PR around this digital VC world that makes us think that it is so successful, but actually the bigger money is in a whole other world. And that is a good thing for climate, because we need real world solutions, absolutely so potentially we need just more private equity.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 38:40

And if I prodexes later on in the journey of a company as well, that's part of the capital stack. But later on, if there was one thing policymakers could do which would make your work significantly easier, what would that be? I will allow you one each if you like. Carmel. Would you like to answer this one? First,

Carmel Rafaeli: 39:02

I I would want them to require a substantial amount of diversity in every one of their investments. So I think if we start having it doesn't have to be 50% but if we start having a requirement, the policy requirement, then we will see within a few years, a substantial change.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 39:28

Cool, Julie, if you would a different one, presumably. But what was your would your policy request be

Julie Blane: 39:36

that the outcomes are transparent, so that if you're every business has an impact on the environment, and the environment will impact every business. Not talking about reporting, I'm not talking about compliance, but I'm talking about the the transparency for how this interplay, this double materiality works.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 39:56

Great, wonderful. And the final question is about the future. What. Are your priorities for the next well, six months, given you're a startup, your priorities perhaps aren't very long term, but like, what are your priorities right now? Let's put it that

Carmel Rafaeli: 40:09

way, raising 300 million pounds for the foundation, 300 million

David Bent-Hazelwood: 40:13

pounds. So if anyone has 300 million pounds burning a hole in their back pocket, please get in touch with Carmel and Julie. Any other priorities, as well as the 300 billion fans of the foundation,

Julie Blane: 40:25

we are welcoming funds, corporate foundations and donor advised funds, as well as founders, to to be in touch. We're growing the network. We're diversifying the network across the world and across innovation. So be in touch.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 40:41

Wonderful and so thank you very much. I think the other thing I would say is that I remember going to a conference about 10 years ago where basically the people were talking about how much money they were trying to invest, and there was no desire to set aside even a percentage of those, these huge funds into creating public goods, like a track record for new asset types, or investing in institutions which would come up with what had to be has measured double materiality in a way that everyone could agree. And it would just seem to me that if capitalism was going to fail, it was because of a lack of capitalists who are willing to take risks and also willing to fund those public goods in some way. And what I find really interesting about the foundation as part of this whole puzzle that you're pulling together is that that is part of create, of adding to that public good of a community, helping to make sure there is a community which can fund an investment from beginning to middle or end, as well as getting deserving businesses, good businesses, over the humps and the periods when they may not be able to make a return in the short term, because our world is not set up to drive the industrial revolutions we need On climate and other issues, and therefore those grants, or these, I want to get the phrasing slightly wrong, the non dilutive, recoverable grants are a way to get through those patches, because in the long term, that will massively pay off for investors and for everybody. So I just want to say a huge thank you to Julie and Carmel of the table, I'll finally get the name of your organisation, right. Sorry about that. So goodbye Julia and goodbye Carmel. Thanks very much.

Unknown: 42:30

Thank you very much. You.