Startups are looking at the climate challenge from all angles. For today’s episode, we’re talking to one that’s helping facilitate the move to clean energy through intelligent software. Peter Knowles is the president of Financial Machines. In our conversation, he told me about how his startup evolved from a consultancy to software based advisory, which is a feat in itself.
On the show, Peter and I also dove deep into energy storage, renewable energy and the challenges of fundraising for a startup.
A lot of lucky people have their personal passions and their professional paths collide. And that could not be more true for Mark Kroese, a 22-year veteran at Microsoft and their General Manager of Sustainability Solutions. Mark started his career at Microsoft in the 90s as a product manager for Word and Excel. Then his love for mountain climbing and visits to the rainforest led him to focus on sustainability.
In this episode, Mark shared his thoughts on sustainability reporting and building databases for that information. We talked about how much water data centers use and the environmental impact of our thousands of saved messages and emails. A big takeaway from chatting with Mark: I need to clean out my inbox to save the planet!
We have a whole zoo in today’s episode about biodiversity! I shared a fantastic conversation with Dr. Vian Sharif, Head of Sustainability at FNZ and Founder of NatureAlpha. Both FNZ and NatureAlpha are platforms for investors. FNZ is a digital wealth management platform while Vian’s newer venture NatureAlpha focuses on demonstrating the impacts of investments on biodiversity & natural capital.
In today’s episode, Vian and I talked about integrating conservation work with investments — and also about pangolins.
We have a little bit of everything in this week’s episode. We’re diving deep with Nathaniel Bullard Chief Content Officer of BloombergNEF, Bloomberg's primary research service on energy, transportation, commodities, and technology. Nathaniel is a little bit different from the founder guests we’ve traditionally had on the show. He’s played the analyst slash writer role for a majority of his vast career and today writes a weekly column under the Bloomberg Green banner where he covers energy, transport, technology, climate, and finance.
In this episode, we talked about what we’re seeing in climate from a market-oriented lens. This episode is so rich that we go from discussing deep decarbonization and where that’s going, to tinkering with Web3 and crypto and how that all connects.
For our first episode this season, we have invited two newly minted, homegrown podcasters from Persefoni: Tim Mohin and Caitlin Kinney! Tim Mohin is a lifelong environmentalist and one of the OGs of sustainability. Tim started his career at the US Environmental Protection Agency and moved on to various roles in corporate responsibility and sustainability at big tech firms like Apple and Intel. He also worked as the CEO of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the world's most widely adopted sustainability reporting standard. Tim’s co-host Caitlin is a Gen Z climate activist who is on a mission to make sustainability accessible to the everyday person.
In this episode, we’ll hear from Tim and Caitlin on why sustainability has to be decoded and what we’re missing in these conversations. Plus: What I’m tracking in climate tech and what I really think about Elon Musk.
