Stopping climate change is the biggest investment opportunity of our lifetime, and its already driving radical change in how financial markets operate. Sign-up for the latest insights into sustainability, ESG and impact investing, and all the episodes of the Good Future podcast as they're released.
From Reluctant VC to Climate-tech Evangelist
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In 2019 Hampus Jakobsson was convinced climate investing was the obvious next step for venture capital investors, but to his surprise, the other partners at his fund (despite being smart and progressive) just didn’t get it. So strong was his conviction that he left the firm to start his own fund, Pale Blue Dot. Fundraising was no easy task, with many potential investors having similar reservations. Some were scarred from the clean-tech bubble, and others couldn’t see past the eye-watering profits of high-margin SasS companies that they knew so well. While climate-tech is certainly a different beast, it often demands heavy capital spending and the technologies are mostly unproven, Hampus saw through that. He knew that the world would have to change in the face of the climate crisis, he could see that there were simply too many opportunities. Earlier technology revolutions had been led by a breakthrough innovation (think Ai, crypto, or mobile internet), which was essentially a solution looking for a problem. Climate-tech is the other way around: the problem is clear, the task for founders and investors is to get to work on the engineering, to find a solution. As Hampus explains, this is much easier, and this is the work his firm has been doing for the past 5 years. So far the market has come with him, as climate-tech has emerged as one of the fastest growing themes in early-stage investing. Listen to the full conversation, with Hampus Jakobsson...
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The Business of Sustainability
Stopping climate change is the biggest investment opportunity of our lifetime, and its already driving radical change in how financial markets operate. Sign-up for the latest insights into sustainability, ESG and impact investing, and all the episodes of the Good Future podcast as they're released.
Impact investing is not an asset class, rather, it's an approach that can be applied to a diverse range of asset classes, and while this I’ve spoken about this concept at length in this newsletter, today I want to focus on fixed income. Fixed income is the world’s largest asset class. It has a set of unique characteristics that make it ideal for driving impact outcomes, but so far it hasn’t been utilised at anywhere near its full potential. Popular perception lags its intrinsic value There’s...
Australia has launched its very own Sustainable Finance Taxonomy, a long-awaited framework to classify what counts as ‘sustainable’. It follows global moves led by the EU, and aims to categorise a range of economic activities, highlighting ‘green’ leaders, as well as sectors making the ‘transition’. To help you understand what it’s all about I found the perfect guest to join me on the Good Future podcast, and that’s Linda Romanovska! In the episode she helps us understand why it’s important...
Amid all the noise, climate change persists Politics will sway like a pendulum, businesses rise and fall, but looking long-term the trajectory is clear, we're pushing our environmental systems ever-closer to collapse. Shifting your focus from the short-term to the long-term is never easy, but this is how investors position themselves ahead of the rest. To recognise the huge challenges on the horizon, and deploy capital to support those delivering solutions. Impact investing is a lens you can...