EC Food Climate and Sustainability – Page 16 – Product Management Confabulation

November 20, 2022

The era of oil-driven foreign policy is over. Welcome to decarbonization diplomacy

For much of the 20th century, oil dominated foreign policy. Countries spent the better part of the century scrambling to secure supply. Sometimes it happened through negotiations and diplomacy. All too often it resulted in the overthrow of governments or outright invasions.

But with fossil fuels on the wane, we’re starting to get a glimpse of foreign relations in the 21st century, and it seems like investment will be the defining characteristic. Decarbonization diplomacy is looking a lot less violent than what preceded it.

It took a while to get to this point — probably too long — but the dam appears to be breaking.

The era of oil-driven foreign policy is over. Welcome to decarbonization diplomacy by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

November 17, 2022

Service 1st Financial sells ‘home comfort as a service,’ gets $20 million in funding from Series B, debt

Let’s face it: Most people aren’t early adopters, especially when it comes to their homes. Take the kitchen, for example, where many people still buy gas cooktops despite induction’s superiority. It’s not because everyone’s busy charring peppers over an open flame — it’s because they’re slow to adopt changes.

When it comes to heating and cooling, that’s a problem for the climate. Together, they account for about half of all energy use in U.S. homes. Heating is a particular challenge since only 40% of homes use electricity; the rest burn natural gas, propane or some other fossil fuel. When the old furnace is dying, its replacement is usually more of the same. To reduce reliance on fossil fuels, switching to electric heat pumps is going to be key.

“If your trusted contractor — who you call to come into your home to help figure out what to do with your system — doesn’t offer a heat pump, you’re just not going to buy one, right?” said Anuj Khanna, founder and CEO of Service 1st Financial.

That gap between what contractors offer and what’s needed to electrify households is part of the reason Khanna founded Service 1st Financial, which offers what he calls “home comfort as a service.” The company is announcing a $5.85 million Series B today that includes a $15 million subordinated debt facility, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Khanna said he expects the Series B to close “before year end.” The equity investment was co-led by S2G Ventures, which also led the subordinated debt facility. Other investors were not disclosed.

Service 1st Financial sells ‘home comfort as a service,’ gets $20 million in funding from Series B, debt by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

November 16, 2022

Metaspectral snaps $4.7M seed round to bring real-time hyperspectral data to recycling

For all its promise, the current state of solid-waste recycling leaves a lot to be desired. Plastic waste is among the worst: It represents about 12% of solid waste in the U.S., but only about 4.5% of what gets recycled.

There are plenty of reasons why we’re terrible at recycling plastics. For one, not all are easily recyclable. The plastics industry hasn’t been doing us any favors, either.

But one that could be more easily solved is the problem of sorting. There isn’t just one type of plastic — there are many and sorting them into a few different categories can go a long way toward making recycling more profitable and feasible.

Metaspectral thinks it’s found a way to make the sorting problem easier, and it’s raised a $4.7 million seed round to launch and expand its data analysis platform, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Investors on the round include SOMA Capital, Acequia Capital, the Canadian government and angel investors including Jude Gomila and Alan Rutledge.

They’re not the first to try to crack plastics sorting, but they’re taking a different tack than many, using hyperspectral imagery to decipher which plastic is which in real time.

Metaspectral snaps $4.7M seed round to bring real-time hyperspectral data to recycling by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

November 15, 2022

WeaveGrid gets $35M Series B to help electrical grid cope with coming wave of EVs

Today, the electrical grid works because utilities have a time-tested playbook. They may not know exactly when you do your laundry, but they generally know washers and dryers run more in the evenings or on weekends. Air conditioners wind up when temperatures soar, and more lights click on during the dark winter months.

But in the coming years, that playbook is going to go out the window. Renewables will reshape the grid, but EVs will present the real challenge. Utilities may know how many solar panels and wind turbines are hooked up, but what about how many EVs get plugged in every night? They might have a rough estimate at best.

That’s where WeaveGrid comes in. The company’s enterprise SaaS serves as a platform integrating data from utilities, automakers, and drivers to help utilities manage the load that EVs place on the grid. This data will be increasingly important in the coming decade, when up to half of the U.S.’ 280 million vehicle fleet is predicted to become electrified.

WeaveGrid hopes not only to help utilities plan for new generating capacity, it also wants to assist in identifying where they can most effectively upgrade their distribution infrastructure, which is going to need a significant overhaul. The average age of the grid’s power transformers, for example, is 25 years.

“If 280 million vehicles all start charging around the same time at night, it’s going to create a lot of pressure on an aging infrastructure that’s really not ready to handle all of these giant batteries charging in a completely erratic manner,” said WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava.

To help coordinate millions of vehicles charging — and to ensure they’re ready when drivers need them — WeaveGrid’s platform pulls data from utilities, automakers and even smart EV chargers to build a picture of when and where the grid will need the most power.

The company is announcing a $35 million Series B led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from new investors Activate Capital, Emerson Collective, Collaborative Fund, and MCJ Collective. Existing investors Coatue, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Grok Ventures, and The Westly Group also invested in the round. It’s Salesforce Ventures’ first time leading a climate tech investment.

WeaveGrid gets $35M Series B to help electrical grid cope with coming wave of EVs by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

November 8, 2022

Carbon cap and trade for developing world could spur massive investments — if it works

Ten years after a cap-and-trade scheme championed in part by John Kerry was unceremoniously killed by one of his colleagues across the aisle, the former senator turned climate envoy is once again pitching the policy as a solution to climate change.

As an idea, cap and trade isn’t bad! It works by having governments cap pollution levels and allot limited permits to polluters so they figure out how best to clean things up. Oftentimes the answer is better technology. Other times the answer is to buy permits from other companies that have done a better job at cutting their emissions. Over time, the number of permits gets ratcheted down and pollution levels drop.

As a policy, cap and trade has been widely applied, in many cases successfully. The U.S. used one in the 1980s to successfully slash sulfur dioxide pollution that was causing acid rain and again in the 2000s to cut levels of nitrogen oxides. The EU is currently using one to trim its carbon emissions, and there are a few regional systems in North America.

Kerry’s new proposal, as reported by the Financial Times, hopes to use cap and trade to encourage investment in the power sectors of developing countries. It’s a policy that’s heading in the right direction, though with enough missing pieces to have me wondering whether it’ll turn out to be a bust or a diplomatic breakthrough, similar to the Paris Agreement. Here’s how it would work.

Carbon cap and trade for developing world could spur massive investments — if it works by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

November 6, 2022

How ButcherBox bootstrapped to $600M in revenue

Some of the best companies only come about because they found a problem worth solving.

For Mike Salguero, CEO and co-founder at ButcherBox, the problem and opportunity in the extraordinarily broken space of meat production and distribution simply could not be ignored. Armed with an idea for how to do things differently, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign back in 2015, which drew the attention of its first thousand customers. From there, the company has continued to grow.

At the recent Creative Technologist conference organized by venture capital fund Baukunst, Salguero shared that the company has seen $600 million worth of revenue without taking a penny of external investment and talked about some of the lessons he learned along the way.

A rocky start

ButcherBox isn’t Salguero’s first rodeo. His first company was CustomMade.com, which raised $30 million in venture capital from First Round Capital, Google and Atlas Ventures in a series of funding rounds.

But in spite of all the money it raised, the company wasn’t successful. “My experience was really bad. We lost everyone’s money, which I felt a lot of shame about,” Salguero recalls. “At the very end, I had diluted myself so much, I owned just 5.5% of the company. The business failed, and we ended up going bankrupt, losing everyone’s money.”

After that, Salguero decided to walk a very different path with his next company, which he started after being confronted with a very personal problem. His wife has a thyroid condition, and in the process of doing an elimination diet to figure out what foods she might be intolerant to, they learned about grass-fed beef. However, this kind of meat was hard to find in the supermarkets in Boston.

“While CustomMade was falling apart, I started calling farmers and asking them if I could buy a half-share of meat,” Salguero laughs. That’s a lot of meat, and he describes it as “basically two trash bags full of beef.”

“I was meeting meat farmers in parking lots, buying a couple of trash bags full of meat — I’m sure that didn’t seem sketchy at all,” he said. “But it was too much meat for my freezer, so I ended up selling the excess meat to friends or people I was working for.”

Former ButcherBox execs leverage meat shipment expertise into new D2C startup

Some of his buyers repeatedly told him that it would be much better if the meat was delivered to their houses, and thus, the basic idea for ButcherBox was born.

Meat in the mail

“I got obsessed with the idea and started researching how you ship meat in the mail. I had no idea how to do it. But I’m a big believer in finding people who have done something before and then asking them for help. It skips a lot of the hard work,” Salguero explains. “I found the former head of operations of Omaha Steaks, which at the time was the big behemoth of meat in the mail. And he just said ‘Oh, yeah, my non-compete just ended. I’ll be glad to help you.’ He put all the pieces together at the beginning.”

Then everything started happening all at once. Salguero was fired from CustomMade and even though he had aspirations of taking a 100 days off, going on a silent meditation retreat and recharging, he threw himself into building ButcherBox less than a week later.

He hired an intern and launched a Kickstarter campaign in September of 2015, a decision made out of a desperation to never raise money again. Fundraising wouldn’t be necessary, he thought, as he wanted to do this as a hobby rather than as a big business.

“I’m only going to put in $10,000 into this thing,” Salguero recalls deciding, adding that he vowed to keep things light and easy. “I gave equity to the Omaha Steaks guy, and I gave equity to the branding studio, which in retrospect was a mistake, because I had way too low of a valuation.”

Mike Salguero, CEO at ButcherBox speaks at the Baukunst Creative Technologists conference. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch

All aboard the rocket ship

“We agree with vegetarians.” Mike Salguero, CEO, ButcherBox

The company had a goal of $25,000 for the crowdfunding campaign, but it ended up raising eight times that amount in preorders. It soon converted a lot of the preorder customers into subscribers, and the rest is history. The company went from revenue of $275,000 in 2015 to $5 million in 2016, then $31 million in 2017 and kept growing.

When COVID-19 hit, the meat-packing industry didn’t fare well, but ButcherBox’s revenue just kept growing as people started subscribing to home delivery services like there was no tomorrow. In 2019, the company had revenues of $225 million, but the pandemic tailwinds nearly doubled its top line to $440 million. In 2021, the company recorded $550 million, and this year, Salguero is optimistic his company will go past the $600 million mark.

“This whole time, I’ve just been on a rocket ship,” Salguero says.

Beyond the numbers, the company has continued to stay true to its original mission of trying to make a difference.

ButcherBox became a certified B corp in January 2021, joining the ranks of other heart-forward companies such as Allbirds, Ben & Jerry’s, King Arthur Flour and Patagonia, and further fortifying its aspirations as a company that takes a stand.

Growing without external investment

Figuring out how you build and grow a company without external investment is an exercise in scrappiness, but Salguero’s team had a few tricks up its sleeve, starting with the Kickstarter campaign and a number of communities who cared deeply about how and what they eat.

The company figured out how to growth-hack its way to success by tapping bloggers and nutritionists. “You said eat grass-fed beef,” the company would tell them and created an affiliate model to help incentivize them to promote its products. “We don’t have any money, so we can’t pay you up front, but we will pay you for every box that person gets, and we will make sure that you get like $10 or $15,” went their communications, Salguero said.

A lot has changed since the early days. Today, the company is paying a lot more up front to get access to customers.

“The decision to not raise money forced us to make those kinds of moves. We created a moat around the entire paleo/keto/CrossFit world with all the influencers,” Salguero recalls. “All of those influencers are all still getting checks from us, and some of those checks are $5,000 to $10,000 a month. They’re not going to rep someone else’s stuff, because they don’t want to stop that income stream.”

The company essentially stumbled into influencer and affiliate marketing, staying lean in the process.

How ButcherBox bootstrapped to $600M in revenue by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

November 5, 2022

Laid off? Climate tech is looking for talent and founders

As rumors rumbled that the U.S. Federal Reserve would hike rates once more — and when it followed through earlier this week — another round of layoffs hit the tech sector. Stripe, Opendoor, Chime, Zillow, Cerebral, Brex, and of course Twitter, among others, have already cut or are about to eliminate thousands of jobs.

That’s bad news for employees today, but it might be good news for the climate in the near future.

Before we get too far, let me say up front that getting laid off is terrible and not something I wish to happen to anyone. Not knowing where your paychecks will come from or what benefits you’ll receive is difficult in the best of times, and it’s far worse when economic signs are mixed or major life changes are looming. I am not at all trying to minimize what people go through when they’ve been laid off. It’s happened to me, and it sucks.

But layoffs also offer a chance at a new beginning. Even before the recent waves of layoffs started washing over the tech industry, people were leaving their old jobs for new opportunities in climate tech.

While this is a TechCrunch+ story, we made sure the paywall is below the key links in case you are job-hunting. Hugs — The TC+ team

“One thing we’re seeing is really, really strong talent leaving larger companies,” Erin Price-Wright, a partner at Index Ventures, said at TechCrunch Disrupt, “because some of the financial upside for public tech companies or maybe even late-stage tech companies has sort of vaporized in the last few months. And people are like, ‘Well, I had these golden handcuffs, and that was preventing me from working on what I really care about. And I don’t have that anymore. So I’m going to take a risk and I’m going to do something.’”

Climate tech has been booming relative to the rest of the market, with startups in the sector raising $5.6 billion in the first half of this year, short of 2021’s crazy hauls but still well ahead of 2020, the next previous record, according to PitchBook. Five years from now, PitchBook expects the climate tech market to be worth $1.4 trillion, a compound annual growth rate of 8.8%.

All those companies are in desperate need of talent. Nearly every early-stage founder in the climate tech space I’ve spoken with in recent months went out of their way to mention that they’re hiring. Job board Climatebase has hundreds of jobs listed right now, and that’s just a portion of the climate tech companies with active listings.

Shaun Abrahamson, co-founder of climate-focused Third Sphere, pointed out that his firm’s portfolio companies are currently hiring for over 400 positions. Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ portfolio companies are hiring for nearly 1,200 positions.

Elsewhere, around 100 companies are using the climate career platform Terra.do to directly connect with applicants, chief business officer Nishant Mani told TechCrunch. The startup frequently runs virtual job fairs to match employees with employers, and business is booming. The platform’s user base is growing 50% month on month, and Mani is aiming to get 1,000 companies actively using the platform in the next six months.

Laid off? Climate tech is looking for talent and founders by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

November 4, 2022

How to land investors who fund game-changing companies

A lot of problems worth solving aren’t ones that you can solve in a year or two or even 10.

For founders and investors alike, such long timelines can seem daunting. But for Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO of battery tech startup Sila, hard tech problems are also some of the most tantalizing.

“It’s always a good time to be a hard tech startup,” Berdichevsky said at TechCrunch Disrupt. “One of the reasons is that the world doesn’t change just because it should. It changes because someone goes after something insanely hard and actually succeeds at it.”

Such hard.tech startups run the gamut from advanced batteries like those made by Sila to nuclear fusion, quantum computing, automation and robotics. Any tech that has the potential for such broad impact also has a massive potential market, and that means a certain class of investors are willing to be in it for the long haul.

“Hire people to do the technical stuff. Keep an eye on it, but then go learn the other pieces.” Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO, Sila

“We look for real step-change, game-changing technologies that are going to benefit everyone and we think that will drive a huge [total addressable market],” said Milo Werner, a general partner at The Engine.

When Berdichevsky founded Sila, he believed his company’s technology, a silicon-based anode that promises to improve lithium-ion battery energy density by 20%–40%, would be a significant enough advance that it would have no problem finding a market.

What he didn’t expect was how long it would take. When Sila’s first product debuted inside the Whoop 4.0 wearable last year, the path to market had been twice as long as Berdichevsky had expected.

How to land investors who fund game-changing companies by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

October 25, 2022

Pitch Deck Teardown: Palau Project’s $125k pre-seed deck

I get a lot of pitch deck submissions for this TechCrunch Pitch Deck Teardown series from people who are raising friend and family rounds, and I mostly pass on them. Often, these decks aren’t very good, but it’s important to remember that they don’t have to be.

For a small round (say $200,000 or below), most well-connected entrepreneurs will be able to find a group of people who believe in them and are willing to invest in them. It’s not about the product (there typically isn’t one), and it’s not about the solution (the company is still iterating).

Such investors are usually betting on two things:

Is this market big enough, and is the problem worth solving big or pertinent enough to give this company a possibility of success?
Are the founders the right people to solve this problem? Do they have the connections, skills or experience that gives them an unfair advantage?

Here’s the truth: When considering very early stage companies, if you can’t say “Yes” to both of those questions with 100% certainty, you shouldn’t invest. If the market isn’t big enough, don’t invest. If the founders are smart, friendly and amazing, but they don’t have something special that gives them a head start, don’t invest.

It was against that backdrop that I received the pitch deck for Palau Project. Its founder, Jerome Cloetens, is a professional kite surfer (!) with an economics degree and an MBA, and he’s taking on climate change.

Let’s take a closer look at how all those pieces come together in a pitch deck.

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.

Slides in this deck

This pre-seed deck has 22 slides, but it could probably have been 10 slides or so. That said, it looks good, and although it jumps from topic to topic a little, I can see how the presentation would take shape. Cloetens notes that the slide deck has been slightly updated since the fundraise, and he mentioned it’s “not precisely as Pitched; some of the design and small content changes (Such as our traction metrics) have been updated.”

Cover slide
Problem impact slide
Problem slide
Solution slide
Product slide
Product slide
Product slide
Challenge slide
Value Proposition slide
Business model slide
Market size slide
Market slide
Traction slide
Metrics slide
Milestones slide
Team slide
Founders slide
“Seed round” Interstitial slide
Mission slide
The Ask slide
Milestones slide
“Equity for thrifthers” closing slide

Three things to love

As I mentioned in the intro, this is a pre-seed deck. As per slide #20, the founders were trying to raise $500,000, and they closed on about $125,000. That isn’t entirely uncommon at early stages. Slightly later on, your plan needs to match the funds, which needs to match the milestones you’re trying to hit.

At this stage, “I just need some money to prove what we are trying to do” will work, and if the angel investors think it makes sense, you’ll raise money.

Simple product, testable now

[Slide 5] Palau Project’s product is super simple, but the power will be in the data. Image Credits: Palau Project

Make your product demos this simple if you can — it’s easy to understand, visual and impactful.

I mentioned earlier that all that matters is the market size and team, and I’ll get to that in just a moment. For now, I was really impressed at how simple the idea is, and how easy it is to imagine this in use. Scan a barcode, get information about a product and get nudged towards products that have less impact on the climate.

As an investor, I would immediately have three questions:

How good is the database and how many products are captured there?
Will people actually use this when they are walking around, shopping?
This use case appears to be in-person, but the business model refers to a commission. How would the manufacturers know that a user has changed their behavior as a result of using an app?

You can learn two things from this slide: Make your product demos this simple if you can — it’s easy to understand, visual and impactful. The second step is to tie it to your value propositions: What’s in it for the consumer? What’s in it for the product manufacturers? What’s in it for your company (i.e. how does this help you gain or retain customers, and how does it help you generate value)?

Traction!

[Slide 13] A product this early with traction is beautiful. Image Credits: Palau Project

When a company is raising its first round, it’s unlikely that it has a product at all, never mind a product with actual traction. If you do happen to have such a product, scream about it from the rooftops. Having 30 downloads per day is impressive, and 10,000 scans shows that the app is working and getting some user engagement. Engagement time is cool, too — there are a lot of early indicators showing up here that the founders may be on to something. Going from 0 to 700 weekly active users in a new market (Portugal) is impressive, too.

Again, the slide raises questions for me:

Scans are great, but I want to know what percentage of those scans were successful (i.e. had products in the database). If users scanned 10,000 items and ended up with 600 hits, and 9,400 “We don’t know this product,” that will make a lot of users turn away immediately.
25-30 new users per day is impressive, but show us a graph and the total number of sign-ups.
TikTok videos are cool, but that’s a vanity metric that means nothing unless it moves the needle on the business side. Did the video result in downloads? More scans? More inquiries?

What you can learn from this slide as a startup is to think about the story you are telling with your metrics, because you could be telling the wrong story, or it could raise more questions than it answers.

Pretend to be a VC for a moment, and ask yourself: If a company told me these numbers, what caused the numbers to happen, and what do they tell me about where the company is going?

Elegant value proposition

[Slide 3] It’s hard to be a consumer who cares. Image Credits: Palau Project

The graphic on the left really rams home a point: corporations blatantly using greenwashing to pretend that they are sustainable, tree-hugging hippies is real (and Coca-Cola, in particular, wraps itself into some curious green pretzels trying to prove how much it cares about the environment), and as consumers, you can’t trust large corporations to truthfully represent what they are doing.

So what is a poor consumer to do? Palau Project’s take on this is a masterful set-up to a pitch and a wonderful way of opening the door to a story.

Coca-Cola’s attached bottle cap is rock bottom of hokey greenwashing

This slide is a great example of a good opener that can help drive the conversation forward. Having a clear value proposition or painting a picture for your raison d’etre is a great way to engage your listeners.

Remember when I said “team” and “market” are the two most important parts of a pre-seed slide deck? You’ll notice the absence of either in this “things I loved” section. There’s a reason for that, so let’s take a closer look at what could be improved in Palau Project’s pitch.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Palau Project’s $125k pre-seed deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

October 20, 2022

Farmers are key to Lithos Carbon’s quest to remove gigatons of carbon

It almost sounds too good to be true: Take basalt dust that today is wasted in the manufacturing of things like asphalt shingles, sprinkle it on farmers’ fields, and it raises crop yields while also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Where’s the catch?

For the entire thing to work, farmers need to add just the right amount of basalt. Too little and they don’t capture much carbon and their crops don’t see any benefits. Too much and the field could end up releasing carbon instead of removing it. Soils are complex systems.

The team at Lithos Carbon thinks they’ve cracked the code. They’re working with farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast, where they’ve already captured over 2,000 tons of carbon this year.

The startup just announced a $6.3 million seed round led by Union Square Ventures and Greylock Partners with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Carbon Removal Partners, the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, Fall Line Capital and Cavallo Ventures. For Greylock and Bain, it’s their first climate investment.

Farmers are key to Lithos Carbon’s quest to remove gigatons of carbon by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch