The Seed

Today's guest is Paul Miller, OBE, the Founder and Managing Partner of Bethnal Green Ventures (@rellimluap)

Paul Miller is the CEO and Managing Partner of Bethnal Green Ventures.

Prior to BGV, Paul was an entrepreneur (startup to improve adult education system) and policy advisor. He also currently serves as Chair of Trustees for GoodGym, a non-profit running organisation that combines regular exercise with helping our communities. 

Bethnal Green Ventures are Europe’s leading early-stage tech for good VC. They back ambitious founders using technology to tackle big social and environmental problems that aim to radically improve millions of lives. Take 6% of shares for companies going through their accelerator program. 

• 8 years of experience and track record
• 127 tech for good ventures backed
• £80m of follow on investment raised by portfolio 
• 12.3m users of BGV portfolio companies’ products and services
• 362 people employed by portfolio companies (46% of which are women – well over double tech sector average)

In today’s episode we cover:

• Who are Bethnal Green Ventures and what is Tech for Good?
• How Bethnal Green works with its startups and its accelerator?
• How investing in purpose driven organisations is no longer charitable - they are better businesses, better employers, better value providers
• The BGV Investment Thesis
• The BGV Portfolio, including how some businesses have thrived through the covid pandemic.
• How institutional capital is slowly making its way into the space
• How diversity might not be as easy as it looks, but that it should be easier than it is

Links to topics discussed in this episode:

• Bethnal Green Ventures
• Big Society Capital
• Dr Doctor
• Piclo

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded January 25th, 2021

Today's guest is Kelsey Lynn Skinner, Partner @ IP Group Plc  (@Kelsey_innovate)

Kelsey Lynn Skinner has been a partner at IP Group plc since 2018. Prior to joining IP Group she had acted as a Board Director in a number of venture, tech and angel funds. She spent a decade in Silicon Valley as a venture investor for early-stage and growth technology companies.

Kelsey is a graduate of Stanford University/School of Business Graduate. Kelsey also has a BSc and MSc in Mechanical Engineering & Thermodynamics from Stanford University, where she played fullback for the National Champions rugby team. 

She is honoured by recent awards including "Investment Woman of the Year" from Investment Week and selected as Top 5 "Best Board Director for a Private Company" from the UK Sunday Times.

Kelsey works at IP IP Group Plc is a leading investment manager specialising in commercialising intellectual property by evolving great ideas, mainly from its partner universities, into world-changing businesses. IP Group Plc was founded in 2001 and has also launched Offices in the US, Australia and New Zealand. 

IP Group has a strong track record of success and its portfolio comprises holdings in approximately 80 early-stage to mature businesses across three main sectors -- Life Sciences, Technology, and Cleantech. The Company is listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange under the code IPO FTSE 250 index with market capitalisation exceeding £1B and Turnover of £1.7B.

IP Group plc is evolving great ideas into world-changing businesses. It addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges through the companies it backs including @nanopore @FLFusion @CeresPower 

The Group provides access to business building expertise, capital, networks, recruitment and business support. Their strength lies in managing this process from finding suitable intellectual property to commercialise to either helping develop businesses and create value out of them, or identifying and establishing appropriate commercial partnerships to do so.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded February 8th, 2021

In today’s episode we cover:

• The difference between the Cleantech 1.0 of the 2000’s and the 2.0 wave of the 2020’s
• How venture capital investors think about IP heavy, and asset heavy investments
• How boards and NEDs can work with founders to support and challenge them
• How diversity helps us to bring more diverse thinking and views to the table, and deliver more empathic impacts
• Some of the companies Kelsey has invested in, including Aqdot

Links to topics discussed in this episode:

• AQDot
• IP Group

Today's guest is  Peter Bachmann, Managing Director and Fund Manager  @ Gresham House Plc. 

Peter Bachmann is the Fund Manager on the £300m British Strategic Investment Fund with a focus on sustainability infrastructure - infrastructure which helps us live more sustainably.

Prior to joining Gresham House, Peter was at Scottish Equity Partners where we helped deliver a 3x return by investing in promising British Tech scale-ups and infrastructure players.

Gresham House plc is a London Stock Exchange quoted asset manager with £4bn in AUM providing funds, direct investments and tailored investment solutions including co-investment, responsibly and sustainably, across a range of differentiated alternative investment strategies.

Gresham's expertise includes forestry, renewable energy, housing and infrastructure, strategic public and private equity. Gresham House is committed to taking the long view in delivering sustainable investment solutions that will continue to be a growing factor in the strength of our market positioning.

In today’s episode we cover:

• Gresham House’s Sustainability Focus and the opportunity for Sustainable Infrastructure
• Scaling Infrastructure Investments
• Angel investing in the Sustainability space
• The importance of Sustainability Outcomes alongside any metrics and disclosure

Links to topics discussed in this episode:

• Gresham House
• Scottish Equity Partners
• Woolf University
• My Wardrobe HQ
• AI.Drivers
• Bower Collective

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded January 25th, 2021

Today's guest is Ben Patten, the CEO and Co-founder @ Good Club Twitter: @BenPatten99

Ben has set up a number of businesses, including Farmdrop. His interests are in sustainability, food and the power of technology to create solutions. He lives in Brixton with his young family and loves healthy eating and swimming in the local lido.

Goodclub offer a zero-emission delivery, zero-waste, ambient goods (think cupboards and pantry) via a monthly membership, online only offering.

GoodClub’s mission is to make sustainable living accessible to everyone.  GoodClub believes it's vital to make sustainable products accessible to everyone.  Goodclub aims to shorten the  supply chain and cut unnecessary overheads so they can improve the access of sustainable goods. 

In today’s episode we cover:

• Ben’s sustainability journey
• The origin’s of GoodClub and their mission to bring sustainability to everyone
• How shopping habits are changing and how the big grocers aren’t keeping up
• Why now is the time to launch a zero waste offering
• The challenges facing retailers and consumers in quantifying sustainability

Links to topics discussed in this episode:

• GoodClub
• Farmdrop
• Loop

Enjoy the show!

Contact Jake
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Episode recorded December 8th, 2020

Today's guest is Pippa Gawley, Founder & MD @ Zero Carbon Capital (@ZeroCarbonCap)

Pippa is Founder and Managing Director at Zero Carbon Capital, on a mission to address climate change through deep-science, hard-tech innovation. Pippa has a long history in this space and spent the last 4 years as a clean-tech investor in the US and UK. She is an active and passionate member of the impact investing world in the Bay Area,  the UK and beyond.  

Zero Carbon Capital launched the Zero Carbon Fund (ZCF) in 2020, to bring her experience and thesis to the early stage UK venture scene. ZCF  invests in ambitious teams with breakthrough deep-tech ideas that can scale to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least half a gigaton per year. This target helps Pippa’s team filter for businesses that can have the biggest impact towards mitigating climate change - the single biggest challenge of our time.

The team’s vision is “an earth where a good standard of living is enabled for everyone, safely and affordably, with zero carbon emissions; reliable electricity, healthy food, comfortable buildings, responsible industry and effective transportation”

Zero Carbon Capital’s current portfolio comprises 9 diverse startups, several having gone on to raise follow on funds from some of the biggest names in Cleantech, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures in the US. 

In today’s episode we cover:

• Pippa’s own journey to becoming a climate-tech VC
• The complexities and nuances of working with deeptech, IP intensive businesses
• The reason Zero Carbon Capital use a half-gigaton emissions reduction hurdle when evaluating startups, and how this works in practice
• How the team evaluates and manages a diverse portfolio of teams and technologies
• Some of the trends Pippa is excited about, and the ideas Zero Carbon Capital are backing 

Enjoy the show!

Contact Jake
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Episode recorded December 8th Jan, 2020

Today's guest isTessa Clarke, Co-Founder & CEO @OLIO (@TessaLFClarke)

Tessa is CEO and Co-Founder of OLIO, a peer-to-peer food sharing app preventing waste by connecting neighbours in hyperlocal communities. Tessa has been featured in Vogue and listed as a Forbes Top 50 Female Sustainability Leader.

OLIO was born out of a frustration shared by the two Co-founders, who couldn’t understand why it had to be so difficult to avoid sending perfectly good food to landfill. This frustration became a call to action when they began to dig into the problem, and understood what a huge market failure this really was. Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, and half of that food waste takes place in people’s homes. With 8.4m people living in food poverty in the UK alone, this just seemed incomprehensible. 

OLIO set out on a mission to build a more sustainable future where our most precious resources are shared, not thrown away. The ambition of OLIO is that by 2030 we can halve the food waste in people’s homes and the local community. 

OLIO’s food sharing platform empowers users to share surplus food, accelerating the sharing economy mind-set while building local communities. 

Since it was founded in 2015, OLIO has signed >2,600,000 users across 49 countries, and is the largest peer-to-peer food sharing network in the world. 

In today’s episode we cover:

• Tessa’s own journey to becoming a sustainability leader 
• The complexities and nuances of the global food waste challenge
• How OLIO managed to identify users, create a community, and leverage their platform to create sustainable change
• OLIO’s own business model, and the challenges faced as well as advantages enjoyed by impact-driven teams
• COVID’s effect on food systems and peer-to-peer sharing in the UK, and how OLIO kept its community intact, and even strengthened over the course of 2020

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded December 22nd, 2020

Today's guest is Jasper, Founder and Managing Partner of Vala Capital.

Jasper has overall responsibility for the Vala Capital Portfolio and typically leads the firm’s efforts to mentor and support the companies they invest in. 

He is an entrepreneur who has founded and invested in many companies in the media, technology and engineering sectors. Previous ventures include: Static2358, Electra Entertainment, Optimistic Entertainment Plc, PlayJam, PlayStack and Arksen. He has generated a number of highly successful exits, creating significant shareholder value along the way.

Vala is a group of entrepreneurs who put our heart and soul into helping visionary founders grow their ventures. Vala provides early stage finance to companies that have potential to achieve scale quickly. 

They invest in various industries, with a special interest in funding innovation that could make a big difference to sustainability challenges. 

Enjoy the show!

Contact Jake
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Episode recorded December 8th, 2020

Today's guest is Mike Penrose, Founder @ The Sustainability Group (@PenroseMike)

Mike is Founder and Chief Executive of the Sustainability Group. 

Mike set up the Sustainability Group to make sustainability and social purpose a core part of how businesses and investors plan for the future. 

Mike currently advises a number of large businesses, family offices, sporting organizations and financial institutions on how to make sustainability and social purpose an integral part of their business and investment strategies.

Their goal at The Sustainability Group is to bring to life a word that means different things to different people and make sustainability tangible. Their vision is to enable businesses and philanthropists to achieve real social impact whilst also being successful.

Prior to setting up the Sustainability Group Mike was Executive Director of Unicef UK, CEO of Action Contre Le Faim in Paris and Global Humanitarian Director at Save the Children.

Mike has a well-established track record in the commercial, humanitarian and development sectors, with 25 years’ experience working in aid and development as well as risk, crisis and disaster management in more than 60 countries.

Mike’s experience of crisis and emergency response is extensive and has included consultant deployments as Head of Operations for the UN WHO in Banda Aceh for the Tsunami response, Crisis Management Advisor for the Torino Winter Olympics, UK Government Department For International Development Operations advisor in numerous emergencies, including Iraq 2003 and the Pakistan earthquake in 2005, and as the Evacuation Team Leader for the inter-governmental civilian evacuations of Lebanon 2006, Guinea 2007 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2007. Mike has also advised many large commercial organisations on how to operate effectively and ethically in fragile environments.

A former hostage, having been Kidnapped in Chechnya in 1996, Mike also occasionally works as a trauma councillor for other former hostages and their families.

In today’s episode we cover:

• What Sustainability means to Mike and what it should mean to business leaders
• How embracing Sustainability is not only the best way forward, but the only way forward
• How Sustainability is about more than just measurement…but about a culture which needs to be embraced and embodied at the very top of organisations
• How, when things change when, capital is contingent upon it and customers demand it - sustainability is currently that change and so the future may be brighter than we fear

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded December 11th, 2020

Today's show is our introduction to the Venturing into Sustainability podcast and is a discussion between your co-hosts Jake Wombwell-Povey and Max Middleton. 

Max is an investment partner at Vala Capital where he has overall responsibility for the Vala Sustainability Funds. Max is an experienced VC investor with a track record of supporting businesses building a more sustainable future. Max joins Vala after several years at the Ingenious Group, where he served as Investment Manager for the Ingenious Infrastructure Ventures EIS Service, focusing on the ‘infra-tech’ (energy, mobility, built environment, resource efficiency) arena. Prior to his time at Ingenious, Max worked at EcoMachines Ventures, a specialist VC focussed on high-growth opportunities in hardware, industrial high-tech and resource efficiency. Max is a CFA charter-holder and with an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA from Vassar College in New York.

Jake is an investment partner at Vala Capital where he leads Vala’s Sustainability efforts. He is also the founder of Attis Ventures, a specialist sustainability investor and accelerator. Prior to his work with Attis and Vala, Jake was the founder and CEO of Goji, a digital financial services platform that digitalises the asset management industry. Jake is a qualified accountant and has a BSc from the University of Manchester.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded December 8th, 2020