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Pippa Gawley is the Founding Partner at Zero Carbon Capital, a UK Climate Fund investing in early-stage companies that are on a mission to fix climate change through deep science innovation
She worked with eBay in the UK, moved to Silicon Valley and is one of the "re-immigrants" as she moved back to Europe.
There's a lot we will learn in this episode from Pippa:
- how to crack the diversity problem in VC and Climate Tech in general.
- the level of maturity of the London and UK Climate tech scenes, how many funds exist and why there are so few Unicorns yet.
- How Pippa runs a VC fund with her husband.
I truly think you will enjoy this one. Pippa brings a unique perspective as a woman Fund Manager AND it's refreshing!
Listen and Learn
- Zero Carbon Capital’s geographical scope, ticket size and strategy (1:40)
- Pippa launched the fund with her husband Alex Gawley (2:00)
- The biggest lessons she brought back from Silicon Valley to the UK (3:30)
- The Climate Tech space is evolving even faster than the rest of Tech scene in Europe (5:30)
- Only 2 Climate “unicorns” in the UK (as of May 2022). Pippa shares the reasons why (7:00)
- Why we need more collaboration between funds and investors in Europe (8:00)
- Their collaboration with Extantia who is LP in their fund (9:00)
- How do we enable more diversity in Venture Capital (10:30)
- The responsibility from Governments, LPs, and the Climate Tech community to help more women get (12:30)
- Why they chose not to work with the UK government fund (14:00)
- There are lots of angel groups that focus on women (15:40)
- The triggering moment that pushed Pippa to become an Angel investor (16:00)
- Why we need outreach programs to encourage friends to get into Angel investing (16:30)
- Pippa’s positioning on funding Software vs Hardware startups (17:30)
- Why Pippa only invest in opportunities where they can be additive (18:00)
- Their decision to invest in less crowded verticals: industrial hardware, hydrogen leakage (19:00)
- How Zero Carbon Capital runs technical Due Diligence and uses an external team of expert for sanity checks (20:00)
- The one area where Pippa has completely changed her mind (21:40)
- Why the laziness of the human species means we will need carbon removal even if the logic doesn’t make sense (23:30)
- Why people love the idea of a silver bullet and why it unfortunately won’t happen (24:00)
- The biggest learning and mistake since starting Zero Carbon Capital (25:00)
- What Pippa would do if she had to start again (26:00)
- Why we need more specialist Climate funds in the future (27:00)
- Why the smaller funds will drive more impact than the bigger ones (28:00)
- Pippa’s great networking recommendations to transition your career into Climate, expand your Climate network (30:30)
- Why listening to Podcasts is the best advice to get up to speed on Climate (31:20)
Show Links
- The 2 UK-based Climate Tech unicorns 🦄: OVO Energy, Octopus Energy
- Extantia (Climate Tech fund and LP in Zero Carbon Capital)
- Diversity VC
- Future world VC → helping people get internships in Venture...
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