Climate CEOs

Scaling carbon removal through existing supply chains, community-aligned infrastructure, and signing up JPMorgan in the process.

–

Barclay Rogers is the founder and CEO of Graphyte, focused on low-cost, permanent carbon removal using biomass burial. 

Graphyte converts agricultural waste into dense carbon blocks and stores them underground, targeting sub-$100/ton durable carbon removal with high scalability.

They’re backed by leading climate investors such as Prelude Ventures, Carbon Direct Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Overture.

Here’s what we discussed:

• Focus on execution, not recognition – Barclay said Graphyte does not chase awards; they focus on building a good business and “the scoreboard takes care of itself.” In his framing, recognition follows disciplined execution, not the other way around.

• Use existing systems instead of reinventing everything – Graphyte’s model borrows from agriculture, timber, mining, and landfill engineering rather than trying to invent an entirely new stack from scratch. For CEOs, that is a reminder that practical innovation often comes from recombining proven systems.

• Build where supply chains already exist – A key part of the company’s logic is plugging into waste biomass streams that already exist at scale, rather than creating a brand-new supply chain. That lowers cost, complexity, and time to scale.

• Community alignment is a strategic advantage – Their approach of turning old quarries into parks or other public-benefit assets is not just goodwill; it helps create local support and makes projects easier to advance. CEOs should hear this as: stakeholder trust can be part of the operating model.

• Your unique background can become a moat – Barclay’s mix of engineering and legal experience clearly shaped the company’s design, including permanence and land-use strategy. His point was that category-defining companies often come from founders combining multiple strengths, not just going deep in one lane.

--

Join our confidential community

Private CEO group for VC/PE-backed climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. Capped at 45 CEOs. → entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter

2-min read. Climate tech finance, strategy, leadership. → entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a podcast review

If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

Your data center project clears IRR. Investors nod. But it still doesn’t get built.

In this episode, we break down decisions shaping climate CEOs right now:

• IRR vs. MCC — Affordability, not returns, is now a gating metric in project finance for data centers
• Cost to ratepayer — Higher bills signal credit risk, regulatory friction, and slower time to cash flow
• Culture types — "Commitment cultures" outperform via speed, trust, and fewer fatal errors
• Leadership calibration — Inject realism in good times, optimism in bad (a la Bill Gurley)

This is about what actually gets financed, how teams execute faster, and how CEOs avoid unforced errors.

--

Work with me (EFI)

• Private CEO group (capped at 50) for climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter (Climate CEOs)

• Read by 40,000 climate operators and investors annually. entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

• If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

Did I get your attention? Bruce Anderson hopes so.

He is the founder and CEO of 247Solar, an MIT-linked spinout, and has worked in solar for more than four decades.

He completed his MIT master’s thesis on solar energy in 1973 and later authored early solar books, including The Solar Home Book.

247Solar is a zero-carbon technology company focused on modular concentrated solar systems that provide round-the-clock clean power and industrial-grade heat using thermal storage and factory-produced components.

Here are some of his insights from the podcast:

• Don’t claim 24/7 if you can’t handle intermittency. Baseload is not just PV + batteries. If your system fails when the sun disappears and storage runs out, buyers will see through it.

• Keep the magic narrow. Buy the rest off the shelf. Reinventing every component is not genius; it is an expensive death march.

• Pick a beachhead, not a buffet. Start with customers who feel the pain most and need exactly what you built, not everyone with an energy bill.

• Customers buy risk reduction, not elegance. Reliability, fallback options, modularity, and financing matter more than how clever your tech sounds. Even if you went to MIT.

• Headcount is not a flex. More people can mean more burn, not more progress. Save the bragging for revenue and staying alive.

--

Work with me

Private CEO group for VC/PE-backed climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. Capped at 45 CEOs. → entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter

2 insights, 2 minutes. Climate tech finance, strategy, leadership. → entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

When will customers overpay for power? When delay costs them billions of dollars. AI demand is rewriting energy economics faster than regulators can react.

This episode draws from real operator conversations across utilities, AI infrastructure, and venture-backed climate companies.

We talked about:

• The “watt-bit spread” - Why a single electron today can be worth billions more than the same electron later for AI companies
• Speed vs perfection - Where customers will accept an 80% solution now instead of waiting for a perfect one
• Radical candor gap - Most CEOs think they challenge directly but default to avoidance or aggression
• Autonomy drift - How high-performing teams quietly slide from ownership into neglect without founder attention
• Pricing power - Identifying customers with extreme urgency and low price sensitivity to accelerate revenue

--

Work with me (EFI)

• Private CEO group (capped at 50) for climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter (Climate CEOs)

• Read by 40,000 climate operators and investors annually. entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

• If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

AI is scaling nuclear plants without touching the reactor, by automating thousands of required workflows behind the scenes.

Nuclearn’s strategy is simple but rare: start painfully narrow, prove ROI fast, then expand across the plant.

Bradley Fox and Jerrold Vincent are co-founders of Nuclearn, deploying AI tools across 70+ global reactors. And shout out to our friends at SJF Ventures for this introduction.

• Land before you expand — Winning dozens of nuclear reactors before raising venture capital proved that a hyper-focused beachhead beats a broad go-to-market in risk-averse industries

• Niche down until it hurts — Targeting a single regulation-mandated pain point (Corrective Action Programs) gave Nuclearn a horizontally scalable wedge into every reactor on earth

• Workforce crises create durable markets — When an industry needs 2-3x its workforce but takes a decade to train people, AI isn't a nice-to-have — it's infrastructure

• Price for partnership, not extraction — Targeting ~30% of customer savings and offering transparent annual subscriptions built trust in an industry that buys on relationships and long time horizons

• Nights and weekends are your proof of concept — If you can't sustain a year of bootstrapped hustle before quitting your day job, you're not ready for the full-time grind of a startup

--

Work with me

Private CEO group for VC/PE-backed climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. Capped at 45 CEOs. → entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter

2 insights, 2 minutes. Climate tech finance, strategy, leadership. → entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

Climate founders are told to add. The best ones subtract.

In capital-heavy sectors, focus isn’t a strategy. It’s survival.

• Strategic sprawl kills startups - more tech, markets, and use cases increase execution risk in already complex systems
• Subtraction as strategy - the constraint is not ideas, it’s prioritization under capital, permitting, and time pressure
• Customer narrowing - don’t sell to utilities, corporates, and governments at once; pick the highest pain buyer and dominate
• Geographic focus - fragmented go-to-market across regions slows permitting, sales, and deployment velocity
• Cultural shift - replace “what should we build?” with “what should we kill?” to force tradeoffs and clarity

--

Work with me (EFI)

• Private CEO group (capped at 50) for climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter (Climate CEOs)

• Read by 40,000 climate operators and investors annually. entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

• If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

AI is quietly replacing helicopters and guesswork in how utilities manage trees and wildfire risk. This CEO explains how satellite data + machine learning turns an $8B problem into a precision operation.

Fiona Spruill is CEO of Overstory, a climate tech company using satellite data and AI to prevent power outages and wildfires. She previously held leadership roles at The New York Times and Meetup.

Overstory is a vegetation intelligence platform focused exclusively on electric utilities, helping them analyze every tree and ground fuel risk across their grid to prioritize action and reduce outages and fires. They’ve raised $68M to scale the venture so far.

We talked about:

• Why vegetation management is an $8B/year blind spot - Utilities overspend with low precision and rising climate risk

• How AI actually works here - Mapping every tree’s height, health, and proximity to power lines from satellite imagery

• The real product isn’t data - Turning insights into prioritized actions for crews in the field

• Focus as a strategy - Killing multiple industries to go all-in on utilities as the only customer

• Climate adaptation vs mitigation - Why grid resilience and wildfire prevention are underinvested but critical

--

Work with me

Private CEO group for VC/PE-backed climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. Capped at 45 CEOs. → entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter

2 insights, 2 minutes. Climate tech finance, strategy, leadership. → entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

Three decisions shaping climate CEOs right now: where to build, how to build confidence, and what to fix first.

• Speed vs purity - 30% of data centers going behind-the-meter, often gas-powered; permitting speed and time-to-power are dominating carbon goals
• Geography arbitrage - red states with faster permitting winning deployment; “Whole Foods per capita” matters less than interconnection timelines
• Confidence loop - most CEOs over-index on “the gap”; tracking “the gain” builds repeatable confidence and better execution
• Evidence over narrative - “we did” compounds trust internally and with investors; institutionalize monthly gain reviews tied to revenue and traction metrics
• Constraint focus - identify the single bottleneck that breaks if demand doubles; apply urgency to the system, not emotional volatility in leadership

--

Work with me (EFI)

• Private CEO group (capped at 50) for climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter (Climate CEOs)

• Read by 40,000 climate operators and investors annually. entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

• If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

Shipping containers, pilot sites, and conservative warranties. Why Tempo is scaling industrial heat the slow-and-steady way on purpose.

--

Tempo is commercializing an ultra-high-temperature thermochemical energy storage technology for the $1T+ industrial heat market.

Pasquale Romano, CEO, has over 35 years of executive management experience, including roles as CEO of ChargePoint with four exits under his belt.

In this podcast, you’ll learn about the following:

• Simplify Innovation: Thermal batteries that integrate seamlessly with existing systems reduce operational friction and accelerate market adoption.

• Sustainable Growth: Avoid rushing for unicorn status; focus on building solid foundations and long-term value over quick exits.

• Strategic Supply Chains: Designing products to fit standard shipping containers allows for efficient distribution and scalability without custom solutions.

• Phased Adoption: Deploying small batches at pilot sites helps clients validate performance and gradually increase energy shifts.

• Innovative Constraints: Engineers optimized battery design within strict shipping limits, turning constraints into practical solutions.

• Flexible Market Channels: Partnering with energy services companies while maintaining direct sales balances customer trust with scalable reach.

• Reliable Foundations: Emphasizing conservative warranties and pilot testing builds a dependable reputation, essential for scaling.

--

Work with me

Private CEO group for VC/PE-backed climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. Capped at 45 CEOs. → entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter

3 decisions, 2 minutes. Climate finance, strategy, leadership. → entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

Former NHL All-Star Mike Richter leads Brightcore Energy, building energy-efficiency and geothermal systems for commercial and municipal buildings.

• Geothermal basics - Uses stable ~55°F ground temp as thermal battery; far more efficient than air-source systems in extreme temps
• Market gap - <1% adoption in North America vs ~25% in Northern Europe; demand exists, deployment is the bottleneck
• Real moat - Directional drilling (800 ft, tight spacing) + in-house design enables dense urban installs; ops advantage > tech
• Geology matters - Bedrock (e.g., Manhattan schist) lowers cost; sand and landfill increase complexity and capex
• Financing wins deals - Energy-as-a-Service + 40–50% tax credits remove upfront cost barriers; nonprofits now eligible
• Capital strategy - Took outside capital to fund equipment + long sales cycles; dilution vs bigger pie tradeoff
• Founder lesson - Transitioning domains requires humility; persistence beats speed in infrastructure markets

--

Work with me
Private CEO group for VC/PE-backed climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. Capped at 45 CEOs. → entrepreneursforimpact.com

Newsletter
3 decisions, 2 minutes. Climate finance, strategy, leadership. → entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com

Leave a review

If you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.