Episode 107: The capital stack for climate, all in one shop

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week you know how I occasionally like to geek out on interesting funding mechanisms for bringing climate solutions to market oh you’re new? Oh my gosh welcome and thank you for listening! 

So sometimes I like to geek out on interesting funding mechanisms for bringing climate solutions to market because at the end of the day good ideas will die on the vine without investors for-profit or philanthropic who are willing to take a risk even if those companies don’t make it. 

And I want to be clear I am HIGHLY aware that many of the companies I talk to here will probably not make it. That’s the nature of risky capital. But the trying matters the ideas stay in the market the inspiration ripples out to the next founder and by god we keep trying. 

Funding for climate tech companies can take a lot of forms and requires a lot of types of capital sometimes it’s money for building a first-of-a-kind demo or pilot facility and that can also show bankability or qualify companies for more project financing sometimes it’s super early capital to get an idea from the lab into the field or to help grow a new company that’s got the potential to go absolutely stratospheric. 

Our guest today was not content working with just one of those capital types so she’s running two different investment firms covering all the financial bases. 

Dawn Lippert

So I'm Dawn Lippert. I'm the CEO and founder of Elemental, which is a nonprofit investor that invests in companies and projects with environmental benefit and deep local impact. And I'm also the founding partner of EarthShot Ventures, which is an early stage venture firm, which is founded on the conviction that reinventing energy and industry are the next trillion dollar opportunities. So our edge lies in software, AI, and critical systems. And both are part of our investment.

platform where we mobilize both philanthropic and private capital from LPs and investors to back entrepreneurs who are building the next wave of consequential companies.

Molly Wood

Amazing. Let's dig in a little bit more to that structure. It's a bit unusual and I want people to sort of try to understand the difference between Elemental and Earthshot, which came later, right? Like Elemental existed and then at some point you said, I think we need an investment arm here. So walk me through some of that journey, yeah.

Dawn Lippert

Yes, exactly. Yeah, so I started Elemental about 15 years ago. We've invested in 160 companies through Elemental. And the idea of Elemental is to invest in the gaps where philanthropic capital can be super catalytic to helping companies grow and create new technologies. So, and projects in particular. So the gap that we've been working on for the last five or so years is first of a kind and early infrastructure project.

at Elemental. And the reason is because about 85 % of the technologies that we need to reduce emissions will come from technologies that are not yet fully commercialized and fully in the market. And so what that means is we have to take all of the amazing sort of invention and entrepreneurial energy that's gone into creating technologies and then work to build first projects, build second projects, build early projects and help them scale. And that's where Elemental has been really focused as a catalytic investor over

the last 15 years. And then as we were doing that, we saw just some really exceptional entrepreneurial talent coming through. And so we decided to start EarthShot Ventures with some of our sort of key partners that we've worked with over time with, you know, amazing investors like Emerson Collective and John Doar and Tom Steyer and Microsoft and Builders and others to create a venture fund that's also backing some of the most interesting consequential companies in the space.

Molly Wood

have those come, I'm like, I want to dig into the details, but let's still, let's, let's take them apart one at a time because elemental all on its own, super interesting. And I think it would be useful. We hear a lot about first of a kind projects and project development and that type of finance. And I think it would be useful to give examples if you can. Yep. Plus it just lets you like talk about your port Co.

Dawn Lippert

Yes. Yes, that's my favorite thing to do because I think, yeah. And first of a kind can seem sort of abstract, but for us, it is really about the examples, about the companies. So we see a lot of opportunity in some of the under-appreciated areas. So for example, about five years ago, we made investment in a company called Fervo, which is a geothermal company that you know. And we backed their first project, which was basically a pilot project, a demonstration project of their enhanced geothermal.

Now I was just there a couple months ago at their new expanded project in Beaver County, Utah. It's super exciting. It's the largest enhanced geothermal project in the world, backed by lots of really strong investors, and it's going to provide firm, clean power, you know, really across the West. And so that is an example of how we would sort of start with a first of a kind project, and the company grows over time to be able to bring in other kinds of capital and grow.

Molly Wood

And then let's even put a finer point on why first of a kind is so important. Like that's the valley of death moment, right? Where somebody has technology that works, but they need to, they need capex. Like they need to build an expensive thing.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah.

There are so many technologies that are working and yet the financial system is not set up to move from venture to just straight to banks or other kinds of scalable capital. There's a bunch of risks that happen in these early projects and we don't have really good financial systems to provide financing there. So we did a report last year that we published and showed there's about a $150 billion capital gap at least just in sort of this first of a kind early infrastructure space.

Why it's so important is that if we're pouring in now about $50 billion a year on average of venture into climate and environmental technologies, and yet if we can't get companies to be able to finance those first projects, the companies cannot grow successfully and have environmental impact, but also become really sort of big economically viable companies. So we have to address this gap in order to make it work. We also recently did a survey just a couple of months ago.

and of a whole bunch of different investors across the spectrum and found that 51 % said the biggest issue for companies growing now is financing their first of a kind or second of a kind, basically their first one or two or three, four projects. So this is this key gap and what we've seen is that philanthropy has a really interesting role to play. And I'll give sort of, yeah. Yeah, so philanthropy can be, well, it's been an evolution and I think

Molly Wood

Right.

Molly Wood

Yeah, that's the other part of this that's just new and fascinating. We're not new to you.

Dawn Lippert 

It's been evolution for philanthropists as well because we can use the philanthropy as catalytic capital and then use it to kickstart a project and then recycle it and use it over and over. So it's kind of like maybe like sourdough starter or something because from the nonprofit side, we can make a nonprofit investment, catalyze the entire loaf of bread to be baked, the whole project to be built, and the company pays us back and we can use that capital again for the next project and catalyze the next project.

So I'll give you one more example that fit into this, which is a company that we backed several years ago, first with an equity investment called Nitricity. And they develop basically organic fertilizer using air and a little bit of biomass and renewable energy instead of using natural gas. So they do it in local areas. So it has very strong local impact and excellent environmental benefit and farmers love it.

Molly Wood

Got it.

Dawn Lippert

But in order to get this product to market, they had to build a first of a kind facility and they were having, you know, they're like, how do we actually pull this financing together? So Elemental had been an equity investor. Then we leaned in for their first of a kind project and gave them a term sheet for $2 million to build that project. They were able to pull together a few million dollars for the rest of the financing based on that structure that we worked through with them. And then based on that, they now have been able to raise a $50 million Series B.

and they're sort of off to the races because they've proved that they can finance that first facility and if it's something replicable, they can finance the next ones. And then they paid us back. So we take that same sourdough starter and we use it to finance the next first of a kind project for another company. So Elemental, we're financing 10 to 15 or so projects a year in this mode.

Molly Wood

That's, yeah.

Molly Wood 

That is, you have said several times philanthropy has an interesting role to play, but that is a specifically interesting role. It's sort of like not pure philanthropy in the way you think about it, where they just give you money forever. That it's actually built into, is it built into all of your deals that you will get paid back where you can, right? Like, obviously that's the concessionary part is you might not always get paid back.

Dawn Lippert 

Yeah, exactly. mean, at Elemental, we're an equity investor and a debt investor. And so we are able to sort of be very catalytic. We also, I in addition to doing the capital side, we provide a lot of services. So for Nitricity on the ground, we were helping bring in community partners, helping bring in students to like learn about this, bring in policymakers and people that would be important for permitting. And so we do, we provide a ton of services as well for those early projects that might be capital, it might be community, it might be other things. So we think capital is a key part of it.

But services and expertise and having someone that's developed tons of projects before is pretty invaluable. So that's the other side of it. I guess the last thing I'll say is on the elemental side, we see elemental as like an innovation engine for services, but also for financial tools. So for instance, we created something called the development safe, which is, it's kind of like an iteration on the very popular Y Combinator safe, which is a very simple equity.

instrument, but we modified it.

Molly Wood

It's a contract for people who don't know it's safe as a contract, a physical one. It's not a physical box, but more importantly, it's a type of pretty simplified investment contract that a lot of investors will use with when they're funding companies. Yeah.

Dawn Lippert

Exactly, it's a simple agreement for future equity. It's a way to fund companies without valuing them right up front and sort of keep capital moving into companies very frictionless way. So we took a lot of the benefits of that tool and we changed it, working with Wilson-Sincini, to be a development safe that specifically is for developing projects, early infrastructure projects, first of a kind projects, and gives us a lot of flexibility to use a...

Molly Wood 

Yep.

Dawn Lippert 

tool that protects us as investors and the entrepreneurs love it because it gives them some options as they develop the project further. And again, this is what we use with Nitricity. It's what we've used with, we've used it nine times in the last year or so and enables companies to pay us back instead of getting diluted with more equity. If they can pay us back, we can recycle the capital again. So that's part of what we're doing at Elemental is providing catalytic capital.

inventing new ways to provide it better, and also really leaning in with services to help de-risk these projects and help companies grow.

Molly Wood

Yeah, and one last point on the financing that I just want to circle back to is that you said, you know, we said you're helping to finance a first of a kind facility and that pays for the proof of the technology, but you also made the point, and I think it's worth coming back to, that it also shows that a project like that can get financed, which is a huge signal to banks and investors down the road.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, in our space we sort of call it this bridge to bankability, which is sort of a funny term of art. But I do think that it is all about sort of building the bridge to the next capital source. Because there is a lot of capital for solutions that are de-risked and scaled. There's a lot of money looking for those kinds of projects. And our job is to build that bridge and help really create a very clear path in terms of the kind of contracts, the kind of off-take agreements that companies have.

the kind of team they have behind this, the way that they can permit this and show they can do it over and over, the way they operate a plant. There's a lot of those kinds of risks that we're trying to address through these early projects and then companies can scale and that's the bridge to bankability.

Molly Wood

Love it. I actually, I like bridge to bankability because I love alliteration. I'm here for it. Okay. So then there you are, you've been doing this, you know, you're 15 years into doing that. And at some point you think I'm paraphrasing what I imagine happened. You think, boy, we're building a lot of great companies that I wish we owned more of. Like, is that how, is that kind of how earth shot gets born inside this, inside elemental?

Dawn Lippert

Yeah.

Dawn Lippert 

Yeah, that's part of it. And also we were seeing some really interesting sort of capital gaps in the venture side as well. And so we wanted to build a venture fund to work with more partners in more ways. And I think as we're sort of thinking about the platform of funds at Elemental and Earthshot, we want to mobilize as much capital into the space for the kinds of sort of returns and impact that folks want to have. So on the Elemental side, that's about like philanthropy, having impact.

focusing on investment innovation. And on the EarthShot side, that's about bringing LPs and investors into the space that maybe are very deep expert climate investors and maybe are new to investing in climate and just see this as an asset class that they want exposure to and that can deliver really outsized returns. So that's our goal at EarthShot. We want to something that's, you know, the best nonprofit catalytic investor can be and the best dedicated venture fund it can be.

Molly Wood

So then how old is the fund and what, at what stage company are you investing?

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, so we launched EarthShot Ventures in 2021. We had our final close in 2022. We've invested in about 24 companies, EarthShot Ventures. We invest from seed to series A and also going into B as well as companies are growing. And we're investing a lot at the intersection of climate and AI right now. We specifically are looking for companies that...

are taking playbooks that have really worked in venture and delivered outsized returns and are applying those to climate. And we see some really interesting opportunities that have come through lately. So one example is looking for companies that are using all of the developments in AI, all of the developments in biology or other new technology verticals and applying them to energy or industrial and other systems. An example is we made an investment

a years ago in a company called Kobold Metals. And they are taking all of the new AI tools and capabilities and using that to map the subsurface of the earth to find where there might be deposits of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and then mine those metals. And this has been using all this new technology to a space that really hasn't changed much in several decades. And their first publicly announced

Large find was in Zambia and has enough copper for a hundred million electric vehicles. So this is the kind of company and the kind of thing that we think is going to be really important to energy transition to these new systems. And so we're looking for those kinds of companies through our shut.

Molly Wood

Fascinating. What, how much crossover, if at all, is there between, are you pretty agnostic about whether there's crossover between, you know, an earth shot investment and an elemental project finance operation?

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, we have a couple of investments in common, we typically have sort of different focus.

Molly Wood

Got it, and they don't have to be right. Yeah, exactly, very different focus. How?

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, they don't have to be in common. We're trying to do a couple different things, but we have a lot of intel that we can share. And then we also share a lot of services across the two. at Elemental, we've built, you know, one of the things we've done at Elemental, think in a way that's quite different, but we think is super important for this space is build a community of entrepreneurs that act as resources for each other in real time. So that's about like, you know, how are tariffs impacting you? How are...

What about this investor? Is this someone that we should work with or someone we should avoid? Like that's a lot of real-time Intel that entrepreneurs find very valuable. And we've been able to build, you know, over last 15 years, a really sort of beautiful giving community of entrepreneurs who are sharing that kind of Intel. And I think that helps people go faster and build better companies.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about AI’s impact on the climate investment landscape and how Dawn’s background in policy at the Department of Energy helps guide startups through uncertain regulatory waters. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Dawn Lippert CEO of Elemental Impact and Earthshot Ventures. 

Molly Wood

What are you seeing? Like what are you seeing? You know, I mean, certainly the conversation around climate tech investments and

Dawn Lippert 

Yeah.

Molly Wood

climate in general has changed a lot. And you have some regulatory background. Like, I wonder how you're thinking about the investment environment in today's sort of policy landscape.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, I mean, the market is uncertain, but I our mission is very clear. We are super focused on helping these companies build through uncertainty. know, certainly there have been a lot of shifts in the market and the investment space in the last year in particular. However, the deals that are the most exciting companies are still really competitive deals. There is capital for companies that are building things that we need.

and especially around the really substantial power surge and need around AI and data centers. Right? So even though we're seeing a lot of uncertainty and the dampening of support on the policy side, it's kind of being counteracted by a lot of momentum on the market side that's coming from a real need to develop energy sources to have more power and to have cheap

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Dawn Lippert 

for a reliable power.

Molly Wood

Um, just a side note that power surge is like the perfect name for a series or a column or a podcast about this. Like I might steal that for a keynote title. It's just so good. It's so good. Um, you know, I, it is very true that they're sort of colliding market forces at a really interesting time. And then also. Pursuant to your sort of current investment thesis.

Dawn Lippert 

You are welcome to it.

Molly Wood

There has been this, I just wanna pick your brain a little about AI in climate, because I think that has been just an interesting conversation all on its own. Like there's a tendency to say, once we have sufficiently smart neural networks and LLMs and AI capabilities, then we'll solve climate change and we'll fix medicine and we'll do all these things. But there are not that many specifics.

about that and it sounds like you are finding those specifics to invest in and I would love to get some more examples and things you find exciting in that space.

Dawn Lippert 

Yeah, I we are really excited about the intersection of AI and climate. And we are conscious that that can be sort of like overhyped in a way, too. So we're really specific. And you mentioned that my background's in policy. When I worked with the Department of Energy and worked on policy sort of early in my career, that sort of

Molly Wood

Sure. Yep.

Dawn Lippert

overall framework really informs now how we think about investing. And a lot of our team has a lot of background in policy because we are not operating in a total free-for-all market when it comes to energy, right? We're operating in very specific regulatory framework. So we're interested in what are the investments that sort of unleash and unlock and harness the power of AI and some of these other new technologies and can...

have a very strong business model within the regulatory framework that we have either today or that we think we'll have over the next five or 10 years. And it will be changing, it already is changing, but there are certain parameters that we're investing in. What I would say is that we are interested in all aspects of how this will impact the system, because we're energy investors, we're also looking at industry, we're also looking at circular economy and materials and other things. And so some of the under-appreciated areas, I think, that we've been really leaning into lately,

are around what's happening with all the sort of physical infrastructure of data centers. So power systems is one part, but there's also the physical infrastructure. So that has to do with what kinds of concrete and steel and other materials are we using in this big build out. Because some of the data center, like I live on the island of Oahu, I live in Honolulu, our whole island uses about a gigawatt of energy or so the course of a year. These new

sort of cities being built with data for data centers are often like three gigawatts, five gigawatts. So it's like three or five times the size of Oahu and a lot of them are just getting bigger. So these are really significant build outs. We're building like whole cities, whole islands, whole sort of giant complexes. So what are the materials we're using to do that?

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Molly Wood

I heard it referred to, not to interrupt you, but I heard it referred to recently as AI as like the largest infrastructure project on planet Earth right now. think Kate Crawford called it that. Yep.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, it's totally, yeah, that's exactly right. And it's all happening in communities. And what does that mean for the communities where they're going as well? So we're very sort of thoughtful about that. So there's a lot of materials going into the build, but then you also think about there's a lot of materials coming out the other side. So for instance, like most servers are only in use for a couple of years, and then they're getting upgraded, not necessarily because they're not working, but because there's like newer, faster, more efficient, more energy efficient, better technology. So we invested, for example,

on the elemental side in a company called MOLG that takes, it basically creates like robotic factories where we're used to robotic factories assembling lots of stuff. They've made robotic factories that disassemble lots of stuff. In this case, it's disassembling servers and laptops, computers and other electronics so that we can recover the most valuable parts of those, refurbish or sort of reset where we need to and then use as many, as much of that material as possible in the sort of circular economy.

Molly Wood

Hmm.

Dawn Lippert

So we're very interested in like overall from a systems perspective, what does this build out mean and where are the opportunities for innovators to come in and make the systems way more efficient, much less wasteful, much cheaper and better.

Molly Wood

I want to ask more about your background in a minute, but while we're on this topic, I'm curious what you think about, I'm curious what you think about communities and their role to play in data centers. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I think not entirely. Like I suspect that we will start to see increasingly local requirements around data center build, right? Or local regulations around infrastructure, or even just people in communities saying, I don't want this if it's going to use up our water.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah.

Molly Wood

And I wonder how you think about the larger kind of storytelling part of that and the need to invest in the things that you're talking about to make them palatable in the future.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, I think that's a really important dimension here. So when I started investing in this space, one of the things I was most interested in is how do you create invitation for new technology in communities? Because most of the time, new technologies have some benefit to deliver. They can be cheaper, cleaner. There's some benefit there. But also there's a lot of inertia and like mistrust of new things coming in. So I got very interested in how do you sort of work on these two together?

And that in a lot of ways is the sort of the essence and the start of Elemental because in order to build projects, you actually, you need financing and the expertise and all these things. You also need community acceptance and ideally invitation. And that's a piece that I've learned so much about living in and building projects in Hawaii that I think we can take a lot of those learnings to other places. And that's what we've been doing at Elemental. So.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Dawn Lippert

You know, there's so many dimensions to it. One of the things that I find really helpful in this conversation is getting very specific. Like, it's not that helpful to say we provide local benefits, but it's very helpful to say we are doing 10 apprentices a year. This is what we're paying them, and this is where we see the career path going, and this is what this sort of workforce partnership looks like with a community college or with this sort of local entity. So it's like...

Getting very specific and I will say that's what we did for example with our fervo investment. We actually with our fervo investment Part of what we were doing was working with them to build the local workforce for geothermal so we invested in fervo and then helped sort of set up and organize a partnership with a local university in southern, Utah to Develop apprenticeship programs, but also

all kinds of other sort of workforce opportunities around this new burgeoning industry. So people are super excited about it and really see the upside for them. And it's much less about, more people are like coming in here, more cement trucks, more like people on our roads. And it's much more about what is the economic opportunity here and how do I get involved in it? And now there's a front door for me to do that. So that's what we're often thinking about when we're thinking about local impact is creating very clear front doors with really concrete benefits.

Molly Wood

Right.

Molly Wood

It's so interesting is when you think about the halo of services you provide, that background is I think often overlooked. Like I really hear a lot of specifically in the VC space, right? I think accelerators generally tend to take a broader view. And so that was probably helpful that has been, and as is your background. But I think there is a tendency sometimes of like technocrats of which I can be one, right? To think, well, there's this good technology.

Dawn Lippert

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood

Obviously people are going to use it and it turns out there are a million reasons and sometimes dollars why not? Yeah.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, and there's lots of incumbents that are benefiting from current systems. So in order to sort of break through those from a relationship perspective and a trust perspective, have to, number one, have a really good value proposition. We invest mostly in things that are cheaper, better, faster, you know, et cetera. But then also where there is relationship and benefit. So if something's better and cheaper, but people aren't really seeing that that will directly accrue to them, it's very hard to make the case to make a change.

So that's where we're focused on a local benefit.

Molly Wood 

And has that, when you think about the narratives for these companies, when you think about storytelling, has that always been a part of your pitch and how has the pitch changed, if at all, again, in the current environment, you know, where I see people replacing climate with, and I have advised them in some cases to replace climate with other words sometimes, but not always.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, it's such a good question. So usually when we're working with companies, they're usually, I mean, in the last 10 years, they haven't really been leading with climate anyway, because climate is more of a theme than sort of a specific. And so what they're usually leading with is this is something that creates jobs, reduces your power bills, provides cleaner water, like really the specific benefits that accrue. And that's what gets people super excited. what we've found, especially at Elemental where we're funding

projects. So we're funding, you know, the expansion of a manufacturing plant in Texas. We're funding, you know, the sort of a new factory in Tennessee. We're funding a critical mineral recycling facility in Ohio. We're funding like a sort of a workforce build out for a product company in Arizona. Like these are that that's where we are. So we tend to be very focused on like, what are these actual places looking for?

And the closer you get to the ground and the closer you get to those projects, the less all of the words and all the sort of noise of politics matters because people are looking for the same thing. People want clean, affordable energy. They want clean water, clean air. They want jobs. want opportunities for their kids. It's actually the same set of things. And so that's where we found the biggest sort of movement.

Molly Wood

Yeah. And then with acknowledgement that this is a tiny bit out of order, tell me about your background and what brought you to this? Like what was your aha moment to start Elemental?

Dawn Lippert

Well, I mean, I don't know if I believe in one aha moment, but it's a real series of learning and amazing mentors and teachers along the way. But I will say one of the things that really, I've always been really passionate about environment and how it intersects with sort of human wellbeing. And I, you know, that brought me to studying when I was in college, studying sea turtles and sea turtle conservation.

Molly Wood

Hahaha

Dawn Lippert

And so when I was living in Vieques in Puerto Rico, this little island off Puerto Rico, studying sea turtles and the nests and the population was declining. And so I was studying, was it humans? Was it other predators? What was sort of happening with the population? And then halfway through the summer, I had set up this whole experiment and I woke up and there was a huge storm. I went out later that day to check on the sea turtle nest that I had been monitoring in my experiment and they were almost all wiped out.

This is storm that was largely fueled and accelerated by climate change. And it just really hit me in a very visceral way that all of the things we care about, that I cared about, whether it was poverty or education or these species or all these other things that I cared about, were kind of overcome by this macro trend of climate. And unless we really work on climate, all these other issues get so much harder.

And so that really shifted my focus from more conservation to focusing on energy, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change. And I've been working on energy and technology in some fashion ever since.

Molly Wood

Amazing. And then walk us through the, I want to hear more about like the policy and then how you made the shift and give me the full origin story. I love an origin story.

Dawn Lippert

Origin stories are fun. I love your origin stories that you get from folks. yeah, like how did something come to be? So like I said, many aha moments, but when I was, as I was working on energy, I went to work in Washington, DC and I was really fortunate when I was working with Department of Energy and doing some consulting that I got to work on two fascinating and very different projects. One was the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, which was this

Molly Wood

It's my favorite part

Dawn Lippert

kind of unprecedented federal state partnership to transition a whole place from fossil fuels to clean energy. And there was a huge economic imperative to do that, because Hawaii was burning oil for power, and that was super expensive. And a lot of alignment with policymakers and everyone to really get this done. And so I got to work on that for a couple of years and pass laws and sort of work on the technical side of what that would mean and all the modeling. And that was really fascinating to be part of a whole economy.

transition. And then on the other side, I was working to launch for the first time ARPA-E, which is, you know, like our DARPA for clean energy, and is really sort of the Department of Energy's first sort of tip of the spear in funding new technology and ideas and innovation. And it was so exciting to be at the very sort of ground floor of that and to see the kind of invention that was happening across the country. And so working on those two, though, I had some like cognitive dissonance because

Molly Wood

Hmm.

Dawn Lippert

they were kind of disconnected because we were trying to do this transition on the ground in Hawaii. And then over here we were investing in really interesting breakthrough technology, but they were kind of not working toward the same thing. So I got very interested in what if you could build a really innovative technology funder that was actually rooted in community and what some of these transitions that were happening on the ground, what would that look like? And that was sort of the origin of Elemental about 15 years ago. So.

We've invested in companies from all over the world, from the US, from Europe, from Asia, from Africa, through Elemental. And the idea is to provide the most catalytic funding possible and then recycle that right back through the nonprofit. So to provide an engine that's always on the edge of what's next in investing in environmental and local impact technologies and just keep pushing that edge, keep pushing that edge and inventing and trying new things. And that's really what we've built through Elemental.

Molly Wood

Yeah. And then to also make it real. Like that's so cool, right? Because there's a point at which some investors just drop off or philanthropies drop off. Like you get to the idea stage or you get to like the it works stage, but it must be very satisfying to really build stuff.

Dawn Lippert

Yeah, it really is. I in the early days of Elemental, we were mostly investing early stage stuff. Like that's where we found the biggest gaps. But then really over time, what we realized was there was much more capital coming into those early stages. Entrepreneurs who had really good ideas or were coming out of universities could find grant funding, could find early angel dollars to do that. And then as they were getting that investment, they're coming up on their series A, spends their series B, and they're trying to build the plant and they're just running into a wall.

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Dawn Lippert

And that's where we sort of over the last five years have really focused on, you we've built on our team at Elemental, a team that works on structuring, right? We're not just sort of like venture investors, like let's find the new most interesting thing. It's like, how do we structure these projects and structure the financing around them and surround them with operational capabilities so the projects can succeed into the future?

Molly Wood 

Perfect. Dawn Lippert is the CEO of Elemental Impact and the founding partner at EarthShot Ventures. Thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate this.

Dawn Lippert

Thanks so much, appreciate it too.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

I should note here that Dawn remains unsatisfied with chilling in her capital stack and the next step she told me is yet another fund specifically aimed at early infrastructure projects involving whole new types of investment vehicles as you might imagine. 

Never be satisfied am I right?  

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Thank you to those of you who already have. Together, we can get this done. See you next week.