Podcast recommendation

This podcast featuring Chris Richardson was worth listening to; I had not come across Uptake Alliance before, but what really resonated with me was:

1) focusing on leveraging existing infrastructure in a smarter way (the @the-ev-button dev story) and;
2) bringing the buyer (corporate) side from early on to venture development.

Reflecting back my own journey on cleantech venture investing during the past 20 years, I did not always fully appreciate how difficult it is for energy / infra improvement ventures to successfully be deployed.

Over 20 years ago, Rolf Wüstenhagen and me published some research papers on the corporate VC funds in the energy space. Those funds were formed during the dotcom years, and most of them did not have a happy ending.

Today there are many more corporate VC funds in the energy & cleantech space than when Rolf and me studied them, but most of them engage and invest on later stage ventures only. Luckily today there are other corporate driven venture programs, that aim to involve energy and cleantech ventures with corporates early on.

But I believe the more we focus on the topics that Chris is talking about in the podcast, the better the end result in the clean infrastructure / energy transition space:
- connect corporations/organization with technical challenges to companies with novel solutions
- focus on improving and leveraging the infrastructure we already have

These are the themes will be working on here at Action Energy Finance and Action Energy Market 2024!