Planet A Ventures: The Human Side of Climate Fund Managers with Nick de la Forge
5/4/2022
0:00
31:25
Nick de la Forge is a General Partner at Planet A Ventures, a German early-stage ClimateTech fund investing in start-ups that have a significant positive impact on our planet.
I really appreciate Nick as a human being and for his unique value system.
In this episode, we will be human, humble, and vulnerable and take you behind the scenes of raising and running a Climate fund.
In this episode, we cover:
- The serendipitous meeting that led to the creation of 3 European Climate Tech funds!
- Thoughts on how to bring more diversity in the Climate Tech space and generate more diverse Fund Managers
- The single trick that dramatically helped accelerate their fundraising
- Showing vulnerability, humility and resiliency are MUST HAVE values in this Climate Fight
Listen and Learn
- Planet A Ventures’ fund structure, scope and geography.
- Starting a Climate VC Fund feels like “assembling an airplane in mid-air”.
- The necessity of privilege to go for 2 years+ without a salary, which reinforces patterns and prevents new managers from getting in.
- The discrepancy in funding going to Female vs Male founders is rooted in the fact that there’s a huge gap of Female founders. That is the problem that should be fixed.
- MOMENTUM (in other words FOMO) is the single biggest driver of success in your fundraising.
- The main differences between fundraising for a fund vs for a startup
- In 10 years, all investments will become Climate investments.
- The importance of taking care of yourself to endure the Climate fight
- Surrounding yourself with other Climate Tech community members and taking a role is the best way to overcome Climate anxiety
- It’s not time for EGOs. We need to be f* wise from now on and make good collective decisions
- Carbon sequestration is actually not as impactful as most think
- The sectors where Planet A have completely changed their mind
- Planet A’s voting mechanism to approve investments
- There is a risk that the large funds get corrupted and leave impact out of the equation.
Show Links
- Planet A Ventures website
- Nick’s LinkedIn
- Sebastian heitman from Extantia (ex Beyond Black)
- Extantia
- Climentum Capital
- The Climate Fiction article I wrote in 2020 mentioned by Nick
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