Bridging the Digital Divide in Climate: Announcing the Climate Capital Summit
By Simran Suri, Senior Associate at Equal Ventures
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Our Prepared Mind philosophy at Equal has always been interdisciplinary — we believe strongly in seeking out perspectives across asset classes and stakeholders. And in an industry like climate, that’s been especially critical. We’ve written at length over the past few months about the need to learn from the past, from those who were in climate before it was cool, to do our best to avoid the missteps of CleanTech 1.0. We believe doing so requires collaboration and learning across industry, innovators and investors to bring these stakeholders together for a universal framework for digital transformation. While this means talking to other early stage investors, it also means talking to infrastructure funds, to field management teams at utilities, to finance teams at developers, and to equity research teams at some of the world’s biggest financial institutions. These conversations are the foundation of the Prepared Mind that we bring to the climate arena and the networks we bring to our companies.
Having started at Equal fresh out of undergrad with no background in climate whatsoever, I can personally speak to the value of this process. My conversations with folks across the climate ecosystem have given me the appreciation and fascination I have for this multifaceted space. They’ve shown me just how important collaboration across these industry groups is for building and scaling businesses, as well as achieving the lofty climate impact our planet will need to achieve. But, this interdisciplinary thinking is often lost in the tunnels of venture. And, as we see more and more new faces on the investing and operating sides of the table, we at Equal Ventures believe it’s imperative to create space for less siloed, more holistic discourse around climate across asset classes, not just within them. Without this discourse, we run the risk of repeating mistakes from the past and the fight for our environment is unfortunately too high-stakes to allow that — particularly considering how close we may be to reliving climate’s last bust.
We wrote in April that “as stewards of capital, we owe it to the founders working to safeguard our future to ensure we are deploying our funds appropriately.” That’s why we couldn’t be more excited to announce the first annual Climate Capital Summit. The Climate Capital Summit is an invite-only, completely free-of-charge gathering of the climate industry’s top capital allocators, executives and policymakers across asset classes. The goal of the event is to provide a forum for climate’s leading decision-makers to gather and discuss trends from CleanTech to ClimateTech, from software to real asset infrastructure, and private markets to public. We’re honored to be hosting some of the industry’s foremost voices, from Cathy Zoi (EVgo), Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures) and Neha Palmer (Terawatt Infrastructure), to James West (Evercore), Lisa Lambert (National Grid Partners) and more, for a series of thought-provoking conversations around some of climate’s biggest gaps and opportunities. It’s our hope that, through the Climate Capital Summit, others will be able to experience some of the conversations we’ve been fortunate to have as part of Equal’s climate practice.
While this event is currently at capacity, if you are an investor, founder, government official or member of the media interested in joining the waitlist in the event space opens up, you can submit your information at this link or reach out to Rick Zullo (zullo@equal.vc) or Simran Suri (simran@equal.vc).
