I took architecture in high school and loved the notion of a sketch having the potential to become a living, breathing home/building/hospital. Had I graduated a few years later when digital design became mainstream, I might have pursued architecture as at least a minor if not a career.

The beauty of the physical world, and how architects and engineers reimagine the world around us, continues to attract me. My now focus on urban resilience has allowed me to meet some of the world’s leading urban planners and explore some of the world’s most amazing urban regeneration projects.

It is amazing to realise that “real estate” projects all over the world have quickly become icons in their own cities and around the world. Someone once told me that London (and any other major city) is like an onion, full of layers that you can peel off. As the examples below show, we are still building new iconic layers that are redefining our cities (and the lives of its citizens).

Sluishuis island, Amsterdam (2022)
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

Amsterdam city planners started envisioning a series of artifical islands in IJburg in the 1960s but approval would not come until 1996. The neighbourhood consists of six artifical islands with three more planned.

Designed by Bjarke Ingels of BIG, Sluishuis (“lock house”) rises from an artifical island on IJ lake and contains 442 appartment units. It is powered by its sister floating island housing 2,200m2 of solar panels and the building has an EPC of 0.0 (energy-neutral).

BIG and Barcode Architects cantilever housing block over IJ lake in Amsterdam

Portland Towers, Nordhavn, Copenhagen (2014)
Design Group Architects

Nordhavn is close to my heart given it was co-developed by Urban Partners (and its zip code is 2150!) but the converted cement silos of Portland Towers merit a mention given the iconic status they have gained in Denmark and beyond. (Portland being a play on words on the climate-damaging portland cement they once stored).

Featured in the FT (albeit the allusion to Miami doesn’t quite fit in the middle of winter), BBC, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Times of India, the urban regeneration of Nordhavn has gained global attention and Portland Towers has become the central image of this new, vibrant neighbourhood north of Copenhagen.

The towers comprise 137,000 square feet of office space and its tenants include the German Embassy to Denmark and became a BREEAM certified building when it opened in 2014.

Elbphillharmonie, Hamburg (2017)
Herzog & de Meuron

In 2001 Hamburg broke ground on redeveloping the Grasbrook island on the former port into HafenCity. It is considered the largest urban redevelopment project in Europe comprising 220 hectares (2.2 square km). It is expected to expand Hamburg’s downtown area by 40% and the Elbphillharmonie (the “Elphi” to locals)has become the icon of this new city-within-a-city.

The concert hall and cultural venue can sit 2,100 people in its main auditorium

The project seemed at one point seemed doomed with a final price tag of €789 million (vs original budget of €77m) but as The Guardian puts it “it’s only appropriate for the building to have the last laugh…[and] is thankfully every bit as spectacular as its architects promised.” In its first year of operation 850,000 people attended concerts and 4.5m people touristed the building.

Elbphilharmonie: Hamburg's dazzling, costly castle in the air

Rising 110m, the building incorporates novel sustainable solutions such as reflective chrome dots on the facade which reflects over 25% of heat radiation and leveraged “Cobiax” technology to lower the amount required concrete for the massive structure. This and other solutions led to a Gold certification by the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB).

The Vessel, Hudson Yards, New York (2019)
Heatherwick Studio

Hudson Yards (and the High Line close by) is probably the most highlighted urban redevelopment project. Groundbreaking on the old railyard began in 2019 after decades of attempts at redevelopment going back to the 1950s. At one point that even included a proposed stadium for the New York Yankees!

While plenty of iconic highrises have been developed across Hudson Yards, The Vessel in the middle of a 5 acres public square has taken on iconic (and unfortunately for a while infamous) status. The 16-story tourist attraction currently counts 291,000 #TheVessel tags on Instagram.

(Following its opening, a series of unfortunate suicide attempts led to its closure and it was reopened in 2021 with new safety netting)

The Vessel itself is simply the visibile part of the master-plan for suistainability, with the 2 hectares of public square serving as a lung (225 trees and 28,000 plants) and a water collection medium with a 230,000 liter (60k gallon) rainwater storage tank. That same water is then used to irrigate the trees and plants across the gardens, to replenish cooling towers and to provide advanced stormwater management.

Google HQ, King’s Cross, London (2026?)
BIG & Heatherwick Studio

While not yet opened, the massive “landscraper” building now near completion in London’s King’s Cross has already gathered plenty of headlines. At 330 meters in length and 11 stories in height, it will be longer than The Shard (UK’s tallest building) is high.

BIG and Heatherwick's landscraper revealed nearing completion in London

It will, in my opinion, become the icon of King’s Cross, the massive urban redevelopment project that starting in the early 2000s turned a shady former railway land (known more for its raves, drugs and night time encounters) into a vibrant 67-acre mixed-use neighbourhood with over 7,000 residents and up to 40,000 workers (including current and future Googlers) and 5,000 students at Central Saint Martins.

Sustainability was at the core of the BIG+Heatherwick design with a mixed timber and concrete structure, 20MWh solar array on the roof and movable (massive) timber blinds for solar shading. This compliments the Welsh solar farm that powers 40% of the whole of King’s Cross energy needs.

Kunstsilo, Kristiansad, Norway (2024)
Mestres Wåge Arquitectes

One of my favourite “iconic” buildings is not in a major European city, but rather in Kristiansad, Norway (pop. 118k). In the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression, this port town in Norway set about building a grain silo. It continued storing grain until its closure in 2008.

In the meantime, a local boy had gone out and conquered the world. Nicolai Tangen, former hedge fund banker and now the CEO of the $2 trillion Norwegian sovereign fund, had personally accumulated one of the greatest collections of modern nordic art and needed a home for it. The donation to Kristiansad’s local Sørlandets Kunstmuseum led to the recomisioning of the silo into Kunstsilo, the modern home of the museum and Tangen’s collection.

Kunstsilo: World's Greatest Places 2024

TIME magazine called it one of the world’s greatest places when it opened in 2024. The juxtaposition of an old indutsrial site in a small port town with modern art and a brutalist edge certainly makes this a less-known but amazing modern icon.

Bosco Verticale, Porta Nuvoa, Milan (2014)
Boeri Studios

You have probably seen a picture of this building in some sustainability-related news story or website or blog post. It’s pretty iconic. Until I saw it this Christmas, I had not realised it was in Milan (I assumed it was in Singapore). While massive highrises sorround it in the Porta Nuvoa regeneration district, Bosco Verticale stands alone, green and stunning.

Recognized as the world’s first sustainable neighborhood, Porta Nuova seeks to be “a innovation hub for sustainable development.”

With 900 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 11,000 plants across 90 species, the building is truly a vertical forest absorbing 30 tons of CO2 per year, but also filtering dust and reducing noise. Its integrated sustainable irrigation system recycles greywater to feed the plants. “By densifying nature, the project provides the equivalent of 20,000 of forest on only 1,500 of built land.”

The inside of the building looks just as stunning as the outside:

And a 3Br, 130m2 3rd floor appartment is currently for sale for a cool €2.5m.

___

There are, of course, many more tales of urban icons being built all around us. If other examples come to mind please add them to the comments! The above were simply meant to bring to life the fact that, in recent times the landscapes, vistas and rooftops of our great cities have been transformed. Urban regeneration continues to create new layers across our cities…and many of them are now being built with sustainability for its cities and its citizens at the heart.

The week I was born, Bad Blood was the top song in the charts… but the fact that it was the one by Neil Sedaka and not Taylor Swift clearly dates me.

Today is indeed my 50th birthday and given the number of people that keep asking me how I feel about it, I guess it’s a milestones that needs to be celebrated. The honest truth is that I am not that concerned about the number today. If anything, it has made me reflective on what I need to do or change to be the man I want to be at 60, and as I have learnt, a decade goes by fast.

Instead, I had been thinking about the past decades and what I wish I could have told my younger self 30 years ago. I guess this is the obligatory “reflections from an old man” post…

To my younger self:

• Be patient: That promotion, that acceptance, that next new, new thing will come. I wish I had told myself to learn to be more patient and enjoy the moment rather than seeking what came next.
• Be present: There are certainly moments in my life that I wish I could relive. Either to experience them again or to perhaps have taken a different course of action. But of course that is not possible. So I wish I had told my younger self to learn to live in the moment, to take it all in (the good, the bad and the ugly) to have lived the moment truly

• Be thankful: So many people throughout the years have gone out of their way for me. From friends making an effort to join me for birthdays, to long talks on a Salvadoran beach, to random acts of kindness (like proof reading my MBA application essay 20 times). What I am today was enabled by their actions. Be mindful and be thankful of those that care about you
• Be still: Certainly a work in progress for me at 50, but there is a certain grace that comes from men of a certain age who seem to glide at a different speed to the chaotic world around them. A few that I have met over the years provide an aspirational role model to seek to emulate (one of them would literally wear a suit to work every day… at Facebook…in the early crazy years). Learn to be still.
• Be intentional while allowing for luck: Someone recently asked me how I had been able to be so “succesful” profesionally. I raised an eyebrow as I had never thought of myself that way. I was lucky, and open enough to take advantage when that luck presented itself. Had it not been for a classmate who told me about the job Google was hiring for, had I not had coffee with the former colleague who told me about Facebook setting up a landing team in Europe, had I not applied to the Exec Ed course on climate at Princeton my life would be very different. Be directionally correct but open to what might come.

• Be interested before trying to be interesting: A person I know well has a superpower. She is able to learn more about a person in ten minutes than I might know having known them for a decade. And it’s simple. She is interested in others. She creates comfort for others to share. She asks questions out of genuine interest. And that is what makes her interesting. In the wise words of Epictetus “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”
• Be vulnerable: I so wish I could tell my younger self that the social adage about men needing to hide their emotions and vulnerabilities is complete BS. Embrace the hard moments, learn from them, ruminate on them, if needed cry about them. It will make you a better man, husband, parent, colleague in the long run

• Be joyful: And by that I don’t mean, fake like everything is OK and put on a happy spin on everything. Linked to the above on vulnerability, I mean being open to moment of great pleasure and happiness. Allow the highs to be high and lows to be low.

Above all, however, should I have the opportunity to meet that 20 year old driving down the streets of Durham, NC trying to figure out what he would do after University, the one thing I would say is “It’s all going to be allright… enjoy the ride!”

And to my now 50 year old self I will say… you still have some work to do on all of the above to be that man you want to be at 60 and beyond!

Having just landed from New York and New York Climate Week #NYCW and while still in a jet lagged mood I figured I would jot down some reflections

The tag line for this year’s event was “Power-On” and that seemed to be the recurring theme. Rather than commiserating, shaking your head in disbelief, asking or offering hugs or outrighrt Greta-style screaming “How Dare You!?” in the halls of the United Nations, the mood this year seemed to have a sense of resolve about moving forward knowing that momentum across the world continues, even if our host country this week (or its current Administration at least) is seeking to slow down, block or outright deny progress.

A recurring theme centered on the need for storytelling. While the US press might be focused on the on-again off-again story of massive offshore wind project in Rhode Island, across conversations, across events it seemed everyone had an annecdote of what’s going right.

From Pakistan going full throttle and becoming the largest importer of solar in 2024, to the image below shared by Ember, with exponential graph after exponential graph.

To a fellow VC recounting her recent trip to Kenya where she discovered that 90% of its energy was already renewable (geothermal)…

…to China’s CO2 emissions falling for the first time last year even before it came out halfway through the week with a commitment to reduce emissions by up to 10% by 2035. And while some were hoping for more ambitious 30% reductions Bernice Lee of Chatham House countered

“There are UN targets, and then there’s reality,” she said. “The reality is the country invested $625bn in clean energy last year — 31% of the global total. Its clean energy surge is reshaping the global economy and displacing coal at home. My bet is that other countries will read the writing on the wall and recognise that China is fully committed, and be reassured as they seek to shift off fossil fuels.”

…to Tom Steyer championing that in California (I know not a different country but it could feel that way sometimes) “Innovation is undeniable: 62% renewables, 1000% battery growth from >1 GW to 13 GW, and gas use down 44% from 2025 to 2023”

…to my friend and colleague Jesse Shapins co-releasing ‘The Copenhagen Way’ sharing lessons of the turnaround of a city that was almost bankrupt into one of the most liveable and sustainable in the world.

Another recurring theme was one of semantics. Whether it has evolved from “impact investing” to “ESG” to “ClimateTech” to “Transition Capital” to “Woke Capitalism” or “Energy Independence” the argument made several was that whatever you want to call it, the capital being deployed into the space remain unabated. The train has left the station… with $2 trillion expected to have been invested in 2024 (on a pathway to a required $6 trillion by 2028) with private investment surpassing public investments for the first time in 2023.

And in the middle of 100,000 people and a thousand events we even managed to not only dissipate across the city but also convene for some of our own including an Innovation Breakfast convened with fellow aligned VCs featuring many of our portfolio companies (aided by a stunning terrace and view)

I am sure that as the jet lag dissipates many more lessons will come forth, but the vibes as I landed back in London were very much aligned to theme of this year’s event… Power On!

As my friends and I get older we are all having to reset our priorities (and our definitions of purpose and dreams)

“I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning, I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own”

Coldplay “Viva la Vida”

I have recently made a concerted effort to make time for friends of old and the lines above from the Coldplay anthem have been stuck in my head…

Reminiscing about old stories with them, reflecting on where my friends and I are today, has made me think about those days in our 20s when we thought we were on top of the world… and the world was there to be conquered.

Paper-millionaires at twentysomething…who were then paper paupers. Freshly minted Ivy league MBAs…who then realised that it opened doors but still required the work. Beaming grooms…with several divorces amongst us. Proud dads…whose work sometimes made them absent dads.

And while none of us are exactly sweeping streets, our older age has made many of us more reflective on what has come…and what lies ahead.

The (very active) Whatsapp group with one group of friends has recently taken an introspective turn. One of them — not exactly the one I usually count on as the soft-mushy one — recently posted this list with the words “food for thought”

Maybe it was the lingering of the Coldplay song and the ramblings in my head that made me respond with the below (and led to this post)

“We are running shorter on No 7 and therefore need to work on 3 and 4 to re-define and achieve 5 and 6 which will enrich 2 with 1”

It seems the castles we envisioned in our youth, the value of the adoration of a crowd, the assumptions of success (financial, family, other) that I myself am re-examining are also top of mind for others in “middle age.”

Health (physical AND mental) has to come first. A mental reframe to learn to “slow down” (not easy for A-types who have achieved throughout their lives by moving fast and breaking things) has to be learnt. A blank slate to redraw what is no longer ambition but now takes on a tinge of legacy beyond us has to be drafted. Love in your life, I am learning — the hard way — has to start with yourself before it can be applied to others.

On reflection, it is also interesting to note that this group of friends are all men… that our perception of what Terry Real calls “grandiose men” syndrome is what made us feel we had the right to “rule the world”…and that as we get to 50 we are all, in our own ways, seeking to discover more down to earth dreams and purpose alongside those that we love and love us…

To counter the Coldplay song, if we each get this pivot right, maybe the song will be wrong and St Peter *will* call our name…

I had been awaiting this email for some time. That I had not yet received it given two older tech-wise children was surprising tbh…

Subject: An AI investigation

Dear Mr and Mrs Hernandez,

Blah, blah… I think I’ve busted your son blatantly using ChatGPT to do his homework… blah, blah. [I paraphrase]

Upon opening the “proof” it was obviously clear that someone much more verbose and wordly-wise than my pre-teen had helped analyse sources and defined that “in conclusion…” historical Source A was more reliable than Source B.

Part of me was upset: Upset at him being too lazy to do the work. Another part was upset that he had been caught (seriously dude at least edit the words!).

But this email had been a long time coming. Kids now have unfettered access to AI superpowers for information retrieval and information summarisation. Of course they will use it. Of course they should use it!

What has not yet caught up is the rules across schools, educational systems, subjects, on HOW to use it.

Is composing your paper on the Magna Carta with AI allowed? Probably for information, but probably not for blanket-writing the 1,000 word assignment. What about for maths? Or physics? Reading comprehension?

The UK’s Joint Council for Qualifications has, I think, come up with the right framework for computer-based assignments. In short, students are allowed to use AI but they must a) document the fact that they did b) document what AI it was (and what version) c) provide the prompt asked and the answer given as an appendix (to prove the student did critical thinking and did not just cut and paste). This sets the bar quite high but at least it admits AI in the classroom is here to stay.

Other schools and universities are shifting back to handwritten assignments in exam conditions but that feels like only a temporary solve .

Four years ago I had a conversation with the Headmaster of this same son’s school and highlighted the forthcoming reality… Like Wikipedia before it, like the internet, like I assume calculators back in the day, technology will creep into the classroom just as it creeps into the workplace. The problem is education, and educational policies, move slowly. He had a chance to get ahead of it back then and think about the right policies, but did not.

As my cheeky son responded to his teacher “while I am sorry that I was not forthcoming in having used AI in my assignment, the school’s IT use policy <link> does not currently allow or not allow the use of AI for assignments”

Like I said… cheeky… but accurate.

I use some form of AI every day, multiple times a day to make me better, more efficient, more accurate in my work. Why can that not start to be taught at school?

In the meantime here are our house rules on AI: we encourage you to use it. We encourage you to check it to ensure it’s not hallucinating. Use it for inspiration on structure or facts. Use it to teach you or remind you. Do NOT use it to do the work for you. And do NOT lie about the fact that you used it.

The reality is academia is catching up…from Professors using software to check for the use of AI (and referring those caught for plagiarism).

Harvard puts the onus on each individual professor to define a policy for their course. Oxford seems a bit more sensible: “Authors should never pass off ideas or text gleaned from AI as their own, and there should be a clear acknowledgement of how AI has been used in the work. Given that the output of LLMs can be incorrect or entirely fictitious, users of these tools must recognise that they retain responsibility for the accuracy of what they write.”

If you use AI to write that brilliant admission essay for a US college and a human or a system catches you, the guidelines state it will be deemed as fraudulent and your admission can be withdrawn.

The battle on the appropriate use of AI in the classroom or academic setting is in its infancy but it was clear it was coming. As my son fessed up on getting caught to his older brother all I heard from the other room was “Bro! You got caught! You have to change the words… “ It seems this battle is going to be a long one…

Why, sometimes, a founder stepping down as CEO is the right move for the company to step up

Maybe it was the return of Steve Jobs, or the absolute control Zuck negotiated over Facebook, but a myth has developed around the notion that a founder should always remain as CEO to optimise for the best outcome of the company they created.

I think that myth is false.

There are indeed certain founders who will grow and evolve, and more importantly, will personally thrive with the challenges of managing a bigger org, more global footprint, less time to tinker with product or engage with customers. For the vast majority of — especially first time founders — that is not the case.

Which is why, given the prevailing narrative, a founder CEO approaching his or her Board and saying “I don’t think I am the right person to lead the next stage of this business and I would like to work with the Board to plan for a seamless succession” takes an amazing level of humbleness, true self-awareness and an impressive (and seldom found) level of security.

That was the conversation that Brandon, the co-founder and CEO of Ampd Energy initiated with me and the rest of the Board early last year. His super powers (and where he gains the most energy from) come from interactions with clients and translating their needs into technical pipeline and products. 11 years after founding the company and leading it as CEO he had a personal desire to help amplify those super powers (while doing what he thought best for the business). He had evolved Ampd from an idea (initially for electric motorcycles!) to a VC-backed globally deployed, sustainable industrial player. He had written the prologue and the first acts of the story. He was now asking for someone to help write the next ones.

Over the past year, I have used the example of Brandon with a number of other CEOs who are evaluating the same voyage — but perhaps not yet had the maturity or realisation that he had.

While the Board considered doing an external CEO search, we soon came to the realisation that the next leader for Ampd was already within our midst:

At the time of our initial investment into Ampd, Brandon and I had a conversation about the senior leaders and skills he needed around him to scale. The need for an operational and strategic CFO became clear and that led to the hiring of Anthony Stewart (and a subsequent blog post from me).

Since joining, Anthony has been much more than a “CFO.” He has been Brandon’s partner-in-crime, chief fundraiser, strategic partnerships manager and while I am not sure, there are rumours he got an Ampd Energy tattoo during a business trip to Southeast Asia. I think Brandon will agree that neither of us could envision Ampd being what it is today without Anthony in the middle of it.

So today it’s LinkedIn-official that Anthony has stepped into the CEO role and Brandon will serve as both Chair and Technical Product Manager (yes, in the org chart Brandon now reports to someone that reports to Anthony… talk about low ego!).

We had our Board meeting yesterday — the first led by Anthony — and Brandon’s engagement was completely different. He was no longer in charge of presenting the results (the good, the bad, the ugly) and while still intimately aware of the details he engaged more strategically, he talked about the roadmap 12–18 months ahead. He seemed to be in the place that made him happiest: seeing his “baby” thrive while focusing at what enthuses him the most.

Anthony, I know that Ampd is in good hands. Thank you for raising your hand to take on this new challenge. Brandon, as I have said to you in private, you have my eternal respect for that conversation many moons ago. It is truly one of the most impressive actions I have ever seen a founder take in 12 years in Venture.

The year(s) ahead for Ampd Energy are extremely exciting as it continues to scale across geographies and use cases. Revenue is now material. Impact on climate and air quality is already impressive. And while today marks a new chapter for Ampd, it feels like the most seamless of transitions from the pages that preceded it…

“Anticipatory obedience”… that was a phrase I heard picked up during conversations in Davos this year. The belief that given the rhetoric (and executive-order led actions) by the new US Administration, titans of industry should proactively start changing their narrative and priorities away from climate change mitigation. The posse of tech billionaires at the Presidential Ignaguation seems to validate this belief.

I’ve never been one to be very obedient so to that belief I say… It’s time for Anticipatory Resistance! Or to quote Trump directly from his Davos Zoom call“This is not a time for pessimism. This is a time for optimism. To embrace the possibilities of tomorrow…”

(of course this quote is out of context and what Trump was referring to was a call to “reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers”. I haven’t felt that seen by a description since Theresa May identified me as a “citizen of nowhere!”)

But it seems that in all the acquiesence being whispered in the not-so-snowy streets of Davos, others were taking a stance by making the opportunity and the business case clear (to an obsessively capitalistic audience).

As Mark Carney pointed out there is “There’s a ‘massive disconnect’ between what some of the heavyweights of global finance are saying and the wave of money flowing into green projects.”

Another financier-turned-politician-turned-climate-warrior, Tom Steyer made the momentum unmissable: “The energy transition is both urgent and unstoppable. While climate science reminds us of the risks of inaction, the accelerating pace of technological innovation and market adoption is a powerful counterbalance.”

Tom Steyer on LinkedIn: The energy transition is both urgent and unstoppable. While climate... | 38 comments

Or as Katie McGinty, CEO of Johnson Controls noted: “The interplay of climate action with other critical concerns offers a unique opportunity for CEOs to pursue decarbonisation as a distinct competitive advantage.”

But maybe it’s important to speak less about carbon mitigation -or the fact that 2024 was the first year the planet surpassed 1.5 degrees - and instead change the narrative to providing resilience, risk-avoidance and capital preservation (see LA Fires — cost: $30bn and counting, Spain floods — $1.8bn, Hurricane Helene — $200bn). As that expert, Al Gore (who BTW has been annoyingly agitating about this since 2006) said:

“Extreme weather events cost $3.54 trillion in the last ten years, $795 billion more than the previous ten years.”

According to the WEF itself “Businesses that fail to adapt to these physical climate risks could lose up to 7% of annual earnings by 2035.”

So with all due respect to those captains of industry… F**K obedience. For those of us that stay the course, the capitalistic outcome will be amazing… and as a helpful correlation we might have saved those obedient folks trillions of dollars…along with millions of lives.

LFG!

The center of the digital world is not in Palo Alto, or even on the West Coast. The “cloud” it turns out is not in the cloud. The cloud (or a vast majority of it) lies in suburban towns in Northern Virgina close to Dulles Airport. Ashburn, VA to be more specific, also known as the Data Center Capital of the World along with others like Reston. “Today, up to 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic flows through” centers in Northern Virgina daily.

Zooming into the massive spike in Goldman’s graph one starts to see building after building, each overlaid with a tech, telco or hyperscaler company name alongside it. 112 of the NoVa data centers are Amazon’s. A distant second is Digital Realty, the $69bn market cap data center REIT with 34 (NB: Since it’s IPO in 2004 Digital Realty stock is up 1,458.08%. 35% in the last 12 months alone)

According to Apollo, data centers consume 26% of all power in Virgina.

So how did this happen? Why Virginia? A deep internet rabbit hole later, I would summarise it as a combination of and accident of geeks, government funding and incentives and reinforcement effects.

Early through the rabbit hole I texted fellow geek and big brain (his not mine) azeem

Bolt, Beranek and Newman refers to BBN, the MIT proffesors who were contracted by ARPA in the 1960s to launch ARPANET, the internet’s predecessor. They did indeed launch the first exchanges between networks, but those linked Harvard, MIT to research labs in the West Coast at Stanford and UCLA. “LO” everyone 😉

So, had this flowed foward in the logical way, one could assume the epicenter of the physical digital world would lie in Boston or Palo Alto or Los Angeles. But just like Silicon Valley started in Philly before a mother drew her son home to orange orchards, a different “mother” led to the move to Virgina.

Which is Azeem’s allusion to ANS, Advanced Network and Services, the company set up in 1990 to support the transition of ARPANET into a commercial entity. That transition led to the establishment of one of the first commercial internet exchange points (MAE-East) in Tysons Corner, VA (where I worked in the dot-com days!).

In 1994 a fledgling startup called America Online (‘you’ve got mail!) acquired ANS for $35m. Tellingly AOL was headquartered in Northern Virgina… and this for me was the aha! moment. The combination of ANS being government funded and thus close to DC, the first physical exchange being in NoVA, and a then client that wanted to be close to that exchange whose young founder (Steve Case) happened to base his company in Loudon County, VA might have been the trigger. AOL soon moved that first exchange to… Ashburn, VA.

As the internet expanded, as this blog points out, Virginia just happened to be perfectly place in the middle of the East Coast to expand North and South. The fact that some well-funded clients crunching a lot of data and needing to share it with peer agencies around the Langley, VA and Fort Meade, MD area likely also helped.

Today, NoVA has one of the most robust fiber optic networks in the world including a number of undersea trans-atlantic cables ending up in the state. Reinforcement effect of where the data needed to flow and consumed.

And slowly but surely local government woke up and in 2010 Loudon County created a tax incentive to bring in even more equipment and physical footprint into the county. The county offered a tax abatement program which given all of the above just made it the logical choice of location even stronger. The recent spike in “missed taxes” from this blog post only exemplifies the acceleration of Loudon data center build outs.

Ashburn sits atop the world’s densest intersection of fiber networks, making it an ideal location to store and distribute data. It is unique in its connectivity, and its data centers are laying the physical foundation of the digital economy.

Rich Miller,
Founder & Editor at Large, Data Center Frontier

Today 26% of all energy consumption in Virgina is consumed by data centers, the highest by a factor of any US state. The energy is provided by Dominion Energy (also infamous for the cyberhack a few years ago).

Recently Dominion stated “We are experiencing the largest growth in power demand since the years following World War II,” observed Ed Baine, President of Dominion Energy Virginia. “No single energy source, grid solution or energy efficiency program will reliably serve the growing needs of our customers.”

And satisfying that demand is going to take time… a long time:

And Virgina as the center of the data universe is only expected to grow. An analysis by the Virginia state government forecasted that unconstrained demand for energy (mostly from data center demand) would double over the next 10 years and almost triple by 2040.

Fascinating rabbit hole making me realise the incredible role that the “Dulles Corridor” has played and will continue to play in the expansion of the internet, AI, and given the insane energy demand, innovation and deployment of efficient and sustainable energy sources.

Enough time has now passed for the PTSD to abate and to allow for reflection on the potential impact of the Trump presidency on the continued scaling of Climate Tech.

An interesting meme has appeared over the last few days signalling that founders and investors think that the Trump presidency might actually be positive for the sector (quite counter-factual at first pass!).

On the 2150 side, Peter Hirsch our Head of Sustainability and Policy had proactively started working on this scenario in October analysing the various policies and potential impact of a Republican sweep of White House, Senate and House on our portfolio on a line by line basis.

TL;DR highlights

• Our portfolio generally looked safe and we seldom back companies based on policy tail-winds or grant financing
• The DOEs Loan Program Office (LPO) could be at risk impacting expected grants or ongoing applications and potential reallocation of funding towards more extractive technologies
• The IRA will likely cease to exist in name, but given how much money (and jobs) have flowed into Red states, and the advocacy of Republican congressmen to ensure the tax credits are maintained it might continue under a new guise
• EV tax credits could be at risk… but then Elon happened
• Biggest risk will come from tariffs impacting supply chain imports and therefore the unit economics of many solutions, but perhaps also triggering a trade war with current partners, impacting international sales

We actively shared this analysis with our founders. The day after the election I checked in with many of our founders and the resilience and attitude I heard from them impressed me…

The day after the election Tom Steyer and Sec. John Kerry of Galvanize Capital penned a note on their thoughts after the election. They stated:

“Events don’t change secular trends: The first Trump administration did not reverse the clean energy transition…This process of rapid transformation did not only occur during the previous four years, it was also taking hold during the Trump administration, and well before that…We expect a Trump presidency to create opportunities and dislocations in the market…”

That theme has continued to be reiterated. On November 8th Bloomberg published “Trump’s Return Is Set to Revive Investment in Climate Startups.” It stated:

“At the same time, the climate tech pitch has changed. Investors and founders alike no longer talk up sustainability and decarbonization, but rather jobs, manufacturing, onshoring and the need to compete with China. All are bipartisan priorities that can play well with Republicans who will run the White House, Senate and quite possibly the House of Representatives.”

Then came a piece in Reuters on November 13th alongside the kickoff to COP29. It included my view on the impact on Climate Tech

For investors in clean technology and the companies they invest in, the election result means a change of narrative, and a focus on non-climate benefits, says Christian Herndandez Gallardo, co-founder of climate tech investor 2150, which specialises in solutions for making cities greener. “This is something we have been planning for, given the tightness of the polls. None of our founders wants to be seen as climate companies,” he said. “The business case has to be about price parity or better performance.”

On November 14th Forbes published “10 Reasons Why Trump 2.0 Won’t Kill The Green Revolution.” It highlighted the momentum in the space, the fact that many of these technologies can thrive (because they are better, faster, cheaper) even without subsidies and the role that private capital, state funding and tech companies (who need a lot of energy for their exploding data centers) play a funding role.

The other side, of course, is that “Trump promise to repeal Biden climate policies could cost US billions…” as stated by The Guardian on November 14th.

What is a highly likely outcome is that the US will withdraw from global leadership on the planet’s common battle against climate change. The question is whether any other player can step in to fill the void. For me that can only be China or the EU acting as an aligned block (which might be in doubt given the recent rightward shift in elections this past summer).

The reality is that in a moment of great risk to our planetary boundaries, the outcome of the US elections increases the risk, but the momentum, the opportunity and the positive views highlighted above gives me hope.

A few years ago as I issued a term sheet for an investment, I told the climate tech founder:

“You have two products. You are very, very good at building the physical product your customers want. You need to hire someone that is very, very good at packaging up that product for the capital markets.”

What I had realised during due diligence was that this specific company was going to have to raise non-dilutive debt alongside equity to scale and that a financial “product” needed to be created alongside the physical one they were selling or leasing.

That conversation has been repeated almost verbatim with half a dozen other Hard Tech founders since then. The delta in momentum for those that followed the advice has been noticeable.

And here I am not talking about FOAK funding but access to mainstream pools of capital from the likes of HSBC Sustainable Finance, Blackstone-backed ClearGen, Blackrock or Barclays — all of which have provided non-dilutive funding to the 2150 portfolio. The capital has been used for asset-financing, Hardware-as-a-Service, working capital, M&A capital or facility buildouts.

Structured finance is a key tool (and milestone) in the scaling of climate tech solutions. Just like you are looking to hire the best-in class chemical engineer or software development, hire a best-in-class stretagic CFO to be your partner for this other, but just as critical, audience of “customers.”

NB: The founder I first said this too did follow the advice and the person he hired has been instrumental in growing the business and becoming a trusted partner to the CEO and the Board… I just wish I could clone him several times over!