Human-Centric Climate Action
Human-Centric Climate Action
A journey across accelerated learning, Silicon Valley shenanigans, and paying it forward to the next generation.
👋 Hi to 1,873 climate buddies 🌳
Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.
Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter about the narrative potential of climate.
In today’s interview, my friend Ben Eidelson - father of two, startup founder, and climate VC - shares:
👨👩👧👦 How family triggered him into climate action
📚 What finishing Stanford at 20 taught him about learning
💻 What he learned from selling his companies to and working at Google and Stripe
💸 Why launching a climate tech VC fund was the highest-impact activity he could do at this stage of his career
🤔 What most start-ups misunderstand early on
Enjoy this wide-ranging conversation 🫶
Human-Centric Climate Action
By Art Lapinsch
Ben, we’ll talk more about your professional life in a bit, but I’m curious, what were some key moments in your private life that made you work on climate? Why were these moments so pivotal?
It’s a great question and my first reaction is that it has been less about a set of key moments in time and more about the culmination of values and the perspective gained through a few big events in my life.
I come from an unusually large family – I’m the third of seven. My parents put nearly all of their energy into us and trying to set us up for the best possible future. Simultaneously, my dad was big on encouraging an interest in physics and understanding how the world works. He wasn’t someone who would take something at face value and would need to find the source material or derive his own conclusions.
In early 2016 – three months after we celebrated together at my wedding and two days after closing funding for my last startup he suddenly passed away at 57. I had never experienced an immediate loss or any setback like this before. In the years following this transformed me to think very regularly about my limited time alive and a new instinct to feel the pain and loss in the world when I read about families experiencing disaster.
Fast-forward to 2018 and my wife and I became parents to our daughter. This coincided with a growing interest and deep pull to understand climate. I think there are lots of ways new parents are trying to protect their kids – from hours researching car seats to trying the latest sleep tactics. I did plenty of that, but also felt a need to understand how the decades ahead for her were going to unfold. I no longer felt the ability to “look away’ and the more I stared into the problem and path we might be on the more I connected to my internal grief and pain of loss to what so many humans may experience in climate crisis. I didn’t know yet precisely what to do with all of those feelings besides sit in them and try and research my way through them to something productive.
I know so many wonderful people in climate come at the problem from a deep long-standing nuanced relationship with nature. I love a good walk in the park, but if I’m honest my true pull to work on climate has always been pretty human-centric. I’ve felt a need to work to minimize human suffering and loss, and to take my feelings about protecting my own kids and extrapolate that out to a broader humanity.
Your educational background reads like a dream curriculum for a future climate tech professional: Physics and Math during high school; Electrical engineering, CS, and Physics at Stanford (undergrad + grad school); research internships at UCSB, Stanford, Apple, and Microsoft… Jesus! … Looking back at this time, what are some of your biggest takeaways? What’s something that was surprising about that time?
I was on a pretty accelerated path and ended up starting at Stanford at 16 and finishing with my grad degree at 20. My biggest takeaway from all the education and accelerated path is that I - and I think most people! - can learn most things if they want to.
I think I have, maybe, a slight natural talent for analytical topics but there were a lot of peers in elementary school that were just as quick to do some harder math problems. The difference ended up being how much effort I put in year after year in just learning the next thing I wanted to learn.
For me, this realization has followed deeply into work and given me the confidence to move into climate. I hold this not to be a realization about me but more of a fundamental belief about people. I think we overly pigeon hole ourselves very early in our educational and career systems.
It’s funny, the impressive things in my background are the startups and big companies and universities, yet, my foundational education was at Santa Barbara City College and my foundational career experience was tutoring math there. I started taking math and science classes there when I was 12 and tutoring shortly after. Tutoring reaffirmed for me that most people can be taught most things.
I remember having a breakthrough with a man in his late fifties taking basic math (think multiplication, division, etc.) and he had lived his life believing he “couldn’t do math.” We worked through problem after problem and it clicked.
One might look at that moment and think that me and that man are opposites but I think we share much more in common.
Multiplication clicked for him in that moment and I know that if now, at 35, I need to dive into materials science or energy policy or something that I’ve never touched there is a path to understanding on the other side.
You sold your first business to Google and your second one to Stripe. How did those two startup experiences compare to each other? What go easier the second time around? What was equally as difficult or even more difficult?
They were quite different companies and phases of life.
The first company was me and a friend who were both working at Microsoft in our early-early 20s itching to build products quickly. We left, built some really interesting new mobile products and one in particular got Google’s attention leading to an acquisition. We never raised capital, brought on employees, or wrote a business plan.
The second company was after 4.5 years growing as a PM at Google I got the itch to build a “real startup.” I began working with a co-founder exploring ideas and from the get go we aspired to build a big Silicon Valley style company. We were thoughtful about markets, customer sets, brought on great investors, and did the whole thing.
They both were great experiences and taught me a lot about the really sticky 0 to 1 phase of company building–which is now the phase I like to spend most of my time in with founders.
I also learned to really love bringing people into the company and helping them grow. While I’m proud of the product, customers, and investors, I’m 10x more proud of the team we pulled together and how much that startup helped launch their careers.
Having built your own business and having worked at two of the most-impactful tech companies I have to ask this question: What’s commonly under-appreciated about startups? What’s commonly under-appreciated about large companies? Why?
🚤 Under appreciated about startups: We’ve culturally over-glamorized founding companies.
The limited resource for a company is never capital, its founder psychology. We also culturally focus way too much on ideas vs. validating ideas. Finally over the last decade more and more founders are learning the skillset of user research but I think it’s existential.
We should talk less about the “light bulb moments” and more about the two hundred conversations that lead to insights.
🚢 Under-appreciated about large companies: People over-generalize about companies and the people that work there.
I do believe companies can have a strong culture and way of working but I also think individual teams, orgs, and company areas can be widely different places to work.
I sort of think about it like different neighborhoods in a city. I also think we over-index on this person must be great because they worked at X and this person must not because they spent so many years at Y. It can be a shortcut just like a university degree but I think it’s a pretty flimsy one.
Having built and sold two tech businesses the next obvious step would have been to leave Stripe and start another startup. Why did you decide against it? What was your thinking process?
My first company was solving for me leaving Microsoft.
My second was to solve for me wanting to really give it a go “building a startup.”
If I were to start a third it would need to be because I found no way out of it. I had to build that specific company and I had to be the one to do it. I wouldn’t think of it as a 2-3 year decision to try it. I would think about it as a 10+ year commitment.
Nothing has yet pulled on me to compel that level of focus and commitment into a specific company that I need to found. Simultaneously, I’m not convinced that if my high order goal is climate impact that me helping one core idea come to life vs a few dozen is the right tradeoff.
It also has come at a time of my life when I have young kids – 5 and 3 year olds.
I want to put my presence and time with them as the top priority. While that can be challenging with any job and many founders do a great job here, I know I would probably struggle with that quite a bit.
Talk us through your climate journey after leaving Stripe. How did you decide what to focus on? What was easier than expected and what was harder than expected? Why?
I didn’t have a destination set but wanted to put myself into as much of a learning mode as possible.
I read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, and most importantly, met a lot of great people working in climate. This organically led to advising and angel investing some great companies and really set the path I was on. I also worked with my brother Nathan to put down our thoughts on the roles of software in climate (“Guide to Software in Climate Tech”).
The hardest part of all of this was just giving myself the permission and time to see where it would lead and not be focused on any output. I’ve been pretty output focused in school and work since I was probably 10 or 11. It took some serious rewiring to let myself wander and see where it took me.
There’s no way I would have started “Climate Papa” and likely not started a fund if I went straight from Stripe to something with clear output.
You just launched a climate-focused fund - Stepchange VC. Why not continue with angel investing? Take us through your thinking.
[Disclaimer: I’m an LP/Investor in Ben’s fund Stepchange]
I always liked working with VCs but I never really thought I would be one.
It had to develop organically. Angel investing was great but two things started to break down:
The first is that I was spending sometimes 5-10 hours a week with companies despite being a very smaller investor and many founders wanted me to invest more if I could.
The second is that I was meeting other great folks that wanted to help me with either their time, capital, or both.
I thought about a few different structures to have a group of people and capital help a set of early stage founders and ultimately you pretty quickly arrive at a unique fund of our shape. And it’s been pretty amazing to see how now that it can exist outside of just me. More amazing folks have joined up to have more climate impact.
You talk to tons of climate tech startups. What are their most frequent problems? What keeps the founders up at night? Why?
I’m typically talking to founders really early in their startup journey. The big problems are always essentially “is there a there there?” - meaning is there actually a customer base that really has this problem and will pay for it.
The other big one is fundraising. I talk to a lot of founders about making sure they don’t build a company to fundraise but instead fundraise to build a company. They need to get to solid conviction in their market and their approach to testing the market and not look for validation from investors.
Plenty of companies have the “right investors” and fail because customers don’t buy their product.
What is an “unlock” you teach to startups on a regular basis? Why is it so little understood? Why is it valuable to them?
Probably the most common one is walking them through a methodology for user research. I usually send them The Mom Test as the top read and I walk them through a reframe of their customer conversations.
The key point is to not pitch your idea to early customers, to not even show them a prototype. It’s to spend the time to learn about your customers.
It’s to stop being a salesperson and instead be a scientist.
It’s an entirely different muscle especially for founders and most product people who seek validation on their idea.
What is something that you have changed your mind about since working in the climate space? What is something you have doubled down on?
Tough question!
I feel like I’m always learning new things and am still making up my mind. I think one journey I went on is - early on - I thought maybe there was a place for technology to encourage certain behavior shifts (e.g. on diet, travel, etc.) and I’m now more and more clear that technology can provide better product alternatives but that any real shifts on those things are going to be cultural.
Doubled down: The key point of our software for climate tech guide is that there is a big role to play for folks with software product backgrounds in climate. I’m more convinced of this the deeper I go. There is so much to build and so much of the world to optimize over the next 20-30 years.
What would you like to see more of? Why?
More history.
I’m spending more of my time reading books about the last 2-4 centuries of infrastructure. We’re working on v6 now of many things that not long ago went from v3 to v4.
Take just home heating. We used to burn wood, then coal, then heating oil/gas, now heat pumps.
I don’t think we talk enough about all the upgrades that came before as inspiration for what we’re doing now.
Ben, you are a father of two - a climate papa. As your kids look back from a net-zero future, what do you hope they will say about our generation?
I wanted to say “I hope they think about climate the same way that we grew up thinking about the Cold War. As this fascinating thing to study but that they didn’t really experience” – and I realized that’s way off. My kids already experience a fire “season” and many kids their age are experiencing massive losses due to climate change today.
They are going to live through this next terrible decade alongside us, and will be shaped by it with us.
I hope my kids see us as the generation that really drove this transition and upgraded our world to something quite a bit more livable.
🙏 Thanks, Ben for taking the time.
I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next ✌️