Chapter 2 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere Climate startups are just like other startups in that they usually require outside capital to help them grow. And like other startups, climate startups raise seed capital. …

We’ve been fans of Future Motion since we first tried the Onewheel. And we’ve come to know Kyle and his team over the years as they’ve solved various hard problems from early manufacturing ramp up to covid component shortages. …

Chapter 1 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere We’ve shared key elements that make for great climate startup ideas: planetary benefits; 2030 timeframes; sneaking in the benefits; cost curves; benefit now, pay later; geographic differences and potential traps. …

Chapter 1 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere Hard to Decarbonize or Hard for Incumbents to Decarbonize Dieselgate was in 2015. Until this moment, auto manufacturers were promoting the idea that fossil fuel auto emissions had been (mostly) solved. The framing was ideal in many ways. Incumbent auto manufacturers could build on existing internal combustion engine expertise…

Chapter 1 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere Climate change is a global issue, but problems and solutions vary greatly with location. When Third Sphere started in 2013, C40 Cities had already mapped out an incredibly detailed space of climate opportunities. City and regional approaches to climate vary…

Chapter 1 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere Over the next decade, we’re going to be able to make many technologies more desirable than the current status quo. And non-equity finance is a critical part of that process because it can help unlock more early adopters. Financing that…

Chapter 1 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere The last 25 years of technology development, outside of China, have mostly been about software, where the incremental cost of each unit produced is very low. For example, for business software maybe 7% of annual revenue goes to cloud services…

Chapter 1 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere Two decades ago, working on climate mostly meant working on renewable energy like wind, solar, or nuclear. At this time, understanding customer behavior was relatively straightforward. Regular conversations with utility management, regulators, and their investors would tell you most of…

Chapter 1 of The Climate Startup Playbook from Third Sphere Climate action today is more valuable than climate action tomorrow. It’s visible in the chart below where bending the curve today, has more chance of keeping us within the Paris Agreement temperature zone. The path we take greatly impacts how…