About this episode
How do you build a climate career centered on bringing people together? Host Michael Gold interviews Susan Kish, a seasoned climate consultant and former banker, about her journey into the climate sector. Susan shares her experiences in establishing impactful climate events, the evolution of clean-tech investment, and the importance of in-person gatherings in driving change. She discusses the setbacks faced during the 2008 financial crisis, her work with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and the importance of building relationships with industry incumbents. Susan emphasizes the need for optimism, resilience, and curiosity in the climate field, and reflects on her desire to be remembered for accelerating change.
Notes and resources
- Susan Kish’s LinkedIn
- US Department of Energy Deploy24 Conference
- Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit
- CERAWeek Innovation Agora
Full transcript
Michael (00:01)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Climate Swings, the show for people reaching for the next vine of climate and sustainability in their professional lives, produced in partnership with climate education and action platform, Terra.do. I’m your host, Michael Gold.
Michael (00:26)
On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Susan Kish. Susan is a reformed banker who spent 20-plus years at UBS and Chase before becoming a consultant and convener of diverse voices in the climate and energy space. She has helped establish some of the most impactful climate events of our time, including the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit, the CERAWeek Innovation Agora, and the US Department of Energy’s Deploy24 Conference.
In addition to this, she serves as a senior advisor for Sightline Climate and regularly speaks and moderates at climate and innovation forums. In our conversation, she dives deep into the serendipitous moments that shaped her career, makes the case for live in-person gatherings as a key lever for change, and explains what climate professionals need to be mindful of in their work.
Michael (01:19)
Susan Kish, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s great to have you here.
Susan (01:24)
Michael, I’m so excited to be here. What a great adventure.
Michael (01:30)
So why don’t we just start with a brief sketch of your career to this point and your current role, your current job.
Susan (01:39)
Sure. So currently, I am a senior consultant at the US Department of Energy, where I work with them specifically on Deploy24, which is a conference I helped to launch last year, focused on demonstrate, deploy, decarbonize. And it’s really focused on how you accelerate decarbonization in the US, bringing together all the developers, the investors in the ecosystem and the federal government, that you need to get to net zero by the middle of the century. I’m also working with the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce through their Economic Development Authority to launch a really interesting conference focused on place-based innovation. So that’s what I’m doing today.
I’m a reformed banker, as a banker for about 20 years, then I was an entrepreneur for about 10. And for these last 10 or 15 years, I’ve been working as a consultant and executive in this area.
Michael (02:46)
So we know that that’s a very high level sketch of your career and what you’ve done, but you’ve had a number of twists and turns on the way to the position that you’re in now. Can you talk about some of the most unexpected or memorable aspects of your career and some of the things that sort of put you on your current path?
Susan (03:10)
Sure. So, just to date myself here, Michael, I started working on Wall Street way before you were born, as the expression goes. I started in Wall Street at Chase Manhattan Bank in the fall of 1980. And life was a little bit different then. Women wore suits and not pantsuits. You wrote letters on electric typewriters.
And spreadsheets were great big pieces of green paper that you had little green whiteout tubes for. So banking and business in general was really different then. In terms of pivotal points, I’d probably point out two. One was when I left being a banker and started my own company. It was called First Tuesday. We were living in Zurich at the time because I worked for UBS. And it was focused on convening venture capital investors and startups, because that was a breathtakingly—still is—inefficient market. And bringing them together in one place was the most efficient way to make that market work. That was a really pivotal point, and the catalyst for that was a merger of UBS and another Swiss bank that meant the career path I thought I was going to have had suddenly disappeared. And I also had three little kids under two, and so made some really interesting choices.
I think the second pivotal point was when I really decided to double down on issues related to climate. I’ve been working in climate and clean energy since literally 2000, but it was really only in maybe 2006 or seven when I joined one of the founding teams at New Energy Finance, now known as BNEF, that I decided, yeah, this is the defining issue going forward is around climate and energy transition. And this is where I want to focus my attention for the rest of my career.
Michael (05:17)
So when you founded First Tuesdays and you were working to pair venture capital with startups, was there a theme to that at all? Was it in the industrial or climate space? Or were you casting a wider net? What was the makeup of the people you worked with at the time?
Susan (05:37)
So this is 1999. This is web 1.0 or 0.8, right? Climate was really not a big thing at that time. We were thinking about websites and ringtones and related areas. And that was a bulk of the investors’ interest and a bulk of the startups who were around. This is when I lived in Zurich. Ironically though, at the same time I had a really good friend, a woman named Gina Domanig. And we were members of really small group, professional women in Zurich who had small children. And I remember we got together, think for somebody’s breakfast or birthday. And she was complaining about the fact she had just gotten the mandate. She had been the head of business development and M&A at Sulzer.
She’d just gotten the mandate to start a new fund focused on the energy transition, which in 2000 was like a crazy niche market. And she was having a hard time building syndicates. Because when you do first round investing, life is much easier for you. If you don’t take the full round, you get two or three other investors to go with you. And so I said, well, why don’t you convene them? Why don’t you bring them all together? Because I had seen the power that came out of First Tuesday and she said, I hate conferences, right? It’s all these, I don’t know, consultants and other people trying to sell me stuff. And I said, well, actually, if it’s your conference, you can make it just for VCs and just for limited partners. And you guys, you know, fund it like you would a syndicated deal.
And so that’s what we did. And we launched a conference called the European Venture Fair, which is now in its 24th year. But that was my first venture into the world of clean energy and climate was seeing those really early—at that point, distributed generation was a topic. Actually, wave energy was a topic. Solar panels were all being made in Germany. I mean, it was a really different market and a really early market.
Michael (08:00)
So it was focused on kind of the early stages of clean energy and clean tech. Is First Tuesday still around? Is it still something that is in existence?
Susan (08:14)
First Tuesday was really interesting because it was a global, for lack of a better term, movement. There were 130 First Tuesdays around the world and we met on the first Tuesday of every month. In 2001, it was sold to an Israeli accelerator who then promptly collapsed. And I went to one of the investors in the accelerator and I said, we want to buy this part of your portfolio back. And so we did and we had 20 or 30 of the cities who were really interested in continuing. Unfortunately, that was a time of a nuclear freeze post 9-11. And so we never quite recaptured that momentum. Many of us went on either continued on a local basis, but the overall movement sort of slowed down with that.
I ended up selling my company First Tuesday in Zurich to a company called Zing, a German LinkedIn, in 2004 or five. I think there are actually a handful of First Tuesdays that still do it. I think Brussels, Chile, Geneva, you know, are doing it, but it was at that time a really, really exciting thing to think around the world. The premise was basically innovation and development does not just happen in Silicon Valley, it happens around the world. And the challenge is surfacing it and getting things funded and getting them exposure.
Michael (09:52)
So first Tuesday may not sort of be what it once was, but obviously the energy around clean tech and climate tech has not flagged one bit. But going back to that time when you first started, you said this was early 2000s, things looked very different. What was kind of, I guess, the vibe around the growth prospects and sort of what people needed to do in order to meet the moment and meet the urgency. I guess maybe the urgency wasn’t as big then as it is now.
Susan (10:28)
Well, you don’t, despite appearances to the contrary, you can’t work in climate or clean energy if you’re a pessimist, right? You really can’t. You have to believe that you’re gonna be able to change the world and that this stuff is gonna make a difference. Your motivation might be that you’re worried about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions in the world or methane emissions or weather changes or whatever.
But even in 2000, there was an awareness of the direction that if we just stuck with a carbon-based economy, where are we going to go? Oil and gas. So there was a sense of optimism about it, and there was a sense of exploration and a sense of hope. I will tell you, though, in 2008, when you had that first boom around all things climate, one of the interesting indicators would be who would attend this teeny tiny energy conference in Switzerland every September. And in 2007 or eight, man, we had Silicon Valley guys flying in from California to come to this itty bitty conference, because this was going to be the next big thing. As we now know, that world collapsed upon itself, and you had a really hard time in funding climate. And now it’s slowly built back over as the urgency, the business case and that economics have shifted. I would say though that a common element across all those years has been the sense that you can drive change. It just sometimes is both slower and faster than you expect. I don’t think any of us in 2000 thought at this point, that solar would be the way it is, that by volume or percentage importance or its role on the global stage. But I also think we thought change would happen a whole lot faster.
Michael (12:32)
So you’re obviously referring to the great financial crisis of 2008 when markets were crashing around the world and every investor was basically just running and scrambling to cover their behinds. And I presume it’s not like the urgency to address climate change diminished, but anyone who needed money at that time realized that that was a very bad time to ask for it. So can you just describe kind of how you saw the prospects for the sector at that time and sort of how the vibe shifted?
Susan (13:09)
Sure. So I think there were three things that were really interesting during that period of time. The first is a reality check. Many investors went into funding climate with the assumption that you’d get the same kinds of returns you were seeing for mobile applications or SaaS, which were just starting to emerge. And the reality is that many of these companies are technologies that have 10-year, 20-year cycles.
And that’s just the way some of these industrials and changing an industry where you actually manufacture and an industry where you need huge amounts of regulations and permits is a slow process. And your exits are often not to the IPO market. Your exits are often to industry. So you had the reality check of, hmm, maybe this climate thing is a little bit harder than we thought.
And that reverberated across both the profile of startups and their founders, and also to the profile of investors. So the second big trend is there was a lot of consolidation amongst the venture firms, right? People who thought they’d do a $3 billion fund were going like, maybe I’ll be able to invest $300 million, right? And so it was actually many ways a wonderful time as they’ll tell you to start a fund, because your returns were so awful, could just go up.
But the people who were investing, they also changed because the expertise you needed, the experience you needed, and the hard-won lessons you needed were different. I think the third thing that started to happen then is—and it’s a reflection of the sense of urgency and realism. You started to change the conversation because climate started to have real impact on business decisions and on people’s lives. It’s a trend you see accelerating the last five years, right? All of a sudden issues around fires and weather are making an impact. Challenges in terms of air and its impact on health is having a difference.
And so there was a, you started to see the emergence of a trend where this is no longer the theoretical issues of climate, but the real issues of climate. And they convened in many of the COPs that were happening there with a big impact for the COP21 in 2015. So those I think would be the three things you started to see emerge. The entrepreneurs changed because it was really an industrial business. The investors changed because corporate investing became more important and the expertise required was different. And you started to see that this was no longer a theoretical need for the energy transition, but a real need whether you’re an industry or a family or a city.
Michael (16:16)
So around this time, or even a bit prior to that, you had started working with Bloomberg, which is obviously a storied news and data organization. Now very well known for its BloombergNEF set of data that it produces about clean energies around the world, but probably at that time, not so much. So can you explain sort of what led you to work with Bloomberg and what that experience was like?
Susan (16:42)
Sure. So remember that conference I helped start back in 2000, the European Venture Fair? Well, we were sort of investor only, except we invited a couple of guys to come and give data. And one of the guys who would come to give data presentation about what the dynamics were was a guy named Michael Liebreich. And he sniggled his way into this conference. I mean, he was so determined to get there because he was really interested in meeting them and selling his information and starting his company, was New Energy Finance, NEF. And he knew me from that conference. When I decided—when I sold my company, First Tuesday in Zurich, he was calling to say, come work for me. No, seriously, work for me because I want to start a—no, I need you to, can you start next week? And he was so—he’s a wonderful guy and he’s a fantastic salesman for himself and he’s very persuasive. And so I said, okay, Michael, yes, I will, because I like Michael. I loved this sector. And it turned out as a former banker that I was really pretty good at starting conferences. Who knew? So I started in the probably October and November of, I think it was 2007 or 8.
He had a date, he had two speakers, and he had a dinner location. And we needed an entire conference within two and a half months. And that was a very intense time, as you might imagine. But it was a fantastic conference. It was a first BNEF summit. We held it at the Four Seasons in London. had Lord John Browne of Madingley was speaking there. We had US guys, David Sandler had just been in the Obama White House.
It was mainly workshops. It was a great conference. But at that point, to be honest, we weren’t quite in Michael’s garage, but we were pretty darn close. Maybe there were 30 of us then, and every single person helped to make that conference happen that first year. Michael had three potential acquirers for new energy finance.
And in the fall of 2009, actually the first day of the Danish COP, the one in Copenhagen, he announced that the company had been sold to Bloomberg. So we went from NEF to BNEF, Bloomberg New Energy Finance. They continued with that conference. And once we were bought by Bloomberg, I continued to have a hosting role and a producing role. But I started working for the CEO of Bloomberg, a gentleman named Dan Doctoroff. And there I did strategic projects working to get the various parts of Bloomberg to work together, the data area, the media area, and BNEF. So that’s how that acquisition happened. Now BNEF is one of the actual shining jewels within Bloomberg. Their research is extraordinarily well recognized and really thoughtful.
In fact, I’ll be going to their conference in London in a few weeks.
Michael (19:57)
And you have also been instrumental in the launch of the Innovation Agora at CERAWeek, which is another feather in your conference cap. So can you talk about that experience and how that came about?
Susan (20:07)
Yeah.
Sure.
So as these things often happen, I went to a college with a gentleman named Jamie Rosenfeld. And Jamie, along with Dan Yergin, was one of the founders of CERA, the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and the founders of CERAWeek, which is now in its, what, 44th, 45th years? And one afternoon, we are both stuck in New York waiting for a plane to get us back to Boston. Because in summer, to go from New York up to Boston, you have to fight the thunderstorms that come up in the late afternoon. There are these huge stacked thunderstorms, and if you time it wrong and the storms come wrong, it’s not rainy, but you can’t go anywhere. And he was there and I was there, and a friend of ours, a mutual friend, guy Juan Enriquez, he had just had lunch with Jamie and just seen me because I was a venture partner at his VC.
Jamie had this idea to say, look, I’ve been doing an oil and gas conference for 30 plus years, but that industry is changing. But the guys who make my conference happen, they do not like change. I mean, they really, really don’t, right? They want it at the same hotel with the same kind of topics and the same kind of thing. So I’m wondering about doing an innovation side kind of thing. Could I do something—keep the main conference as it is, but do something inside that catalyzes change. And I said, well, why don’t you just do a conference within the conference? And that’s how the Innovation Agora was born, was because we were stuck having a beer at LaGuardia one summer afternoon. And we produced it for the following March. And the concept was that that little conference inside the big conference would focus on the issues that the industry was going to have to deal with going forward, but weren’t really front and center for the big incumbents and the whole way the industry was structured. And those had to do about the impact of technology and digital. They had to do with the impact of the energy transition. And they had to do with the social economic changes and technology changes that accompanied both. So we started with— it was in a huge hotel, the Hilton in Houston. And we just took the lobby outside and I worked with this wonderful designer, guy named Jason Ramos, who I still work with. And we built a little tiny theater out in the lobby and then we built a small theater next to it, tiny place for doing pitches. And the place was jammed, right? Standing room only, because I built it as a theater in the round, right? And it was a real, you know—it was a great success. So we did the next year and we got three of the proper rooms. And then the third year was so big, we had to move across the street to a convention center. This year, this was probably, I don’t know, the eighth and ninth year, the Innovation Agora was actually as large, if not larger, than the main conference. So Jamie had the right instinct in terms of when to get that started. And it was transformative for that sector because it gave the incumbents, you can argue gave them air cover, but it also gave them a way to start thinking about this and start because the industry has been around. It’s one of the biggest industries in the world and changing an industry isn’t just done overnight.
Michael (24:02)
So it seems like your main playing field has been in the realm of live, in-person events, which feels so quaint in our era of Zoom and Teams and conference calls. What is it about the live, in-person experience that you think maybe catalyzes change better than this kind of virtual interface or other forms of interaction?
Susan (24:30)
Michael, I’ve been called many things over years, but quaint has not being in that vocabulary. I believe in the power of serendipity, and I believe in the power of relationships. And I also believe in authenticity. And so I think the themes are not just bringing people together, but bringing people together with content that’s quality and that’s trusted and that gives you the fact base with which to make decisions to move forward.
So I think the magic is that if you are trying to build a market, let’s say geothermal, for example, right? Which I’m doing a lot of work with just right now. You need to sort of think about it in three buckets. You need to think about it from the technology. You need to think about it from the resources and you need to think about it from the capital. But if you don’t have all three of them together, you are not gonna get deals done. And you’re not gonna get deals done if you don’t know who to call.
And if you don’t have some connection in some form with those people. So even way back when at First Tuesday, the reason First Tuesday was electric at that time, like this is way before you had LinkedIn. This is way before AngelList. This is way before, I mean, something called Moreover started by Nick Denton was like, my God, this was a list combination that you could get your newsfeeds picked up. It was, this is really early.
But the magic of First Tuesday is investors would come in and they’d have a green badge and startups would come in and they would have a red badge. And so these guys would come in with stacks of their business plans and they’d see an investor getting a beer and they’d go over and they’d pitch them because otherwise the guy would never return your call.
So the difference is, the reason I think that the quaint method of convening is powerful is because you get to actually meet these people and you talk to them and you look them in the eye. And then maybe you bump into them again at a law firm’s office or at another conference or because you know somebody, you know somebody and somewhere along that line you have enough of a conversation that you can call them up and say, hey, I’m thinking of doing a geothermal deal, but I’m thinking of doing it in Georgia and not in California. Can I come talk to you about it? There is exponentially easier to do that than a cold call. And most of these firms don’t make it easy to do what they call discovery. So if were to be really abstract about it, I’d say that this is all unbelievably, these are opaque markets. And they’re increasingly opaque if you’re early stage. And what conferences and convenings and workshops and whatever do is they make them more liquid. They make them more transparent. You know who to call. And when that happens, deals happen and deals happen faster. And that is ultimately where I think that’s where I can help make these markets change and help make that change happen faster.
Michael (27:59)
Of course, I say quaint it with the utmost of irony. You are anything but quaint Susan Kish. Of course, in your space, working kind of at the intersection of sort of the new trends of the future, and trying to sort of help the old industries of the past adapt to them. There’s a lot of resistance. And as you were sort of alluding to discussing CERAWeek, these old oil and gas companies really wanted to have things be the same way they’ve always done it. So how do you kind of push through that resistance to change? And in particular, when it comes to climate tech and the energy transition, where entrenched interests are very, very, very strong.
Susan (28:53)
Well, economic history is littered with cases where industries were, they explode and then they self-destruct. And the exceptional company, you can look at whatever that lovely statistic is, right? The composition of the S&P 500 or 100 and how that changes with alarming regularity like every decade. So being in business and being profitable and being a huge company is not a guarantee of your long-term existence. You may feel like it’s a guarantee. You may feel like you really own the world, but not, no, things do change. So my sense is for the incumbents, it is not clear to me that the oil and gas industry will have the same composition of players in 30 years that they do today. I’m really hard pressed to believe that. I’m also consistently impressed with the quality of engineering and the quality of the people who are inside many of these incumbents.
And reconciling those two points is tough. What’s really fascinating about some of these oil and gas companies is people have been working there five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years. They don’t move much. Now that’s a good thing because it makes working inside the company very efficient. Because everybody knows everybody and you know how it works and you can get things done. But it also makes you really vulnerable. Because you have, it’s very difficult to challenge the existing structure. And it’s very difficult to have a different perspective. You don’t have the antibodies.
So my sense is that in terms of what you can do, you have to look for the marginal change. They are really good at engineering and drilling and geopolitics, well, yes, geopolitics, but geophysics. They’re really, really good at that stuff.
And there are skills and experience there that really can make a difference going forward. But I don’t think that’s a guarantee of their long-term success. What drives me nuts is when some of the incumbents basically say, well, you know, there’s this energy transition, but let’s be real. It’s not, you’re going to still need oil and gas. And use that as a reason to sort of—I wouldn’t say diminish, but to imply that all this changes on the margin. All this change is your fantasy. All this change is sort of girlish whims. I don’t buy that. I think that there is, I majored in history of science and history of technology when I was at school. And you look at the trends and if there’s an underlying trend that forces change, it’s going to happen.
You can’t determine when and you can’t determine how fast, but you can say it is going to happen. And denying it is going to make you the clipper owners of the 1890s when steam ships were coming up. I’m sure they assumed that if they could just build a faster ship with more sails. No, no, there is a better, faster, cheaper. And most people who own EVs and like them, well see, it’s more fun to drive. I really do not miss charging up my car, filling up my tank at a gas station. And I really like, you know, just having a car that works, right? So I think that it’s going to be difficult for the incumbents to make that change. I think that industry and investors are going to give them air cover because it’s really tempting to do that. But I think the long-term trends are unavoidable.
Michael (33:23)
So on the other side of the playing field, there’s the sense that climate practitioners or the climate movement has a sort set of baked in characteristics. And one of that is ingrained opposition to energy incumbents, and especially the fossil fuel industry, big oil and gas players. How do you see what they can do to best affect change and how they can work in the landscape in which we operate in a way that maybe doesn’t just sort of default to vilification.
Susan (34:02)
Got it.
So think there are two points to it and then a case study. So the first point would be making it black and white is never a solution to resolving a challenge as big as this one. Not all incumbents are evil empires and casting them as such oversimplifies the situation. By the same token, not holding them to a standard of transparency and honesty and reporting, minimizing their ability to sort of maneuver things in the background, keeping all those things clear is a battle that needs to be constantly fought. Greenwashing and related parts of it are a reality. But I think a really interesting example is the work that EDF has done around methane. So EDF is the Environmental Defense Fund.
And a gentleman over there, Mark Brownstein, does a really good job of keeping the incumbents, working to keep them honest, right? Challenging them on their data, challenging them on their assumptions, challenging them on the way they position the energy transition or dismiss it. However, he keeps that conversation open. He is present.
And the EDF is present at the big industry convenings, whether that’s CERAWeek or ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi. And through that, he has earned the relationship and respect of many of those players. What that means is when EDF works on methane reporting, when EDF funds a satellite called MethaneSAT, which will look at a very granular level about where methane emissions are, he’s got conversations to get that information out there to affect change, to get them to close the leaks. So there are ways dismissing them is probably might make you feel good, but doesn’t necessarily move the dial forward. Figuring out a way to have honest conversations that actually make a difference. That’s the art. And that would be a really—I found EDF’s actions to be really interesting case study of how to make that happen.
Michael (36:24)
So you’ve obviously kind of made the swing into climate, so to speak, from banking, sort of from the earlier stage of your career, sort of through all the transitions and into what you’re doing now. At what point did you kind of realize or start thinking that climate was the field that you wanted to be focused on and that you really wanted to work in climate and be a climate practitioner?
Susan (36:49)
It’s probably when I joined Michael Liebreich and the team at New Energy Finance, right? Seeing the data in and out, whether it was about the impact, potential impact of climate change on one hand, or the potential difference that these emerging technologies would make on the other, that gives you the sense of urgency and optimism that are sort of the twin—and resilience are the things you have to have. Because it isn’t easy. You’re going to get setbacks, things are going to take longer time. Every time you think you’re moving forward, it’s two steps back. So I would probably put it as 2008, 2009 as the times when I really started focusing on that sector. I’ve done other things in between, but the red thread, as the Germans used to like to call it, the red thread that I think has guided my career choices has been impact.
And this is a place where I believe that I as an individual can have impact that actually makes a difference to the world. Now, I’m very proud of the fact that my daughter, for example, she works in urban planning, specifically around urban transportation, works for a Dutch consulting firm that focuses on that, Mobycon. And I’m really proud of the fact that she’s looking at that area and focusing on that.
The choices we make, everybody has to figure out what motivates them, what gets them out of bed in the morning other than just like it’s a job. For me, it’s been places I can make a difference and places where that difference makes a difference. And the areas around climate and energy transition are the guiding light for that.
Michael (38:45)
What have been some of the most prominent setbacks that you feel like you’ve experienced in your career? Obviously the 2008-9 period was a kind of setback for everybody, but maybe from a more personal level, can you talk about times where you sort of felt your sense of mission and purpose flagging and what you did to get over that?
Susan (39:05)
Yeah, leaving Bloomberg was probably a big one, right? So I worked, as I think I mentioned, for a gentleman named Dan Doctoroff, who was the president of Bloomberg, while Mike Bloomberg was mayor of New York City. Mike went through his terms, Mike came back to Bloomberg, and Mike initially said, Dan, you keep running the company. I’m having fun playing golf or whatever. And then I think Mike got bored. So Dan moved on to his next venture.
Mike came back in as effectively president, although I don’t think he has a title. And as part of Dan’s staff, I left. And that was really hard, right? Because I really liked working at Bloomberg. And I liked the impact that BNEF could have as part of that Bloomberg family. So that was a career setback that caused me to sit back and think through, where can I make a difference? Where are the industries that I want to look and focus on? And what do I do next?
That gave me the chance to really think about these areas of energy. And it was the place where I went and joined the small VC as a venture partner for a year looking at startups, because I knew that that had been one of the constant themes. And it made me really focus on the energy transition and climate. I’ve looked at a bunch of other industries. I’ve worked at health. I’ve worked in media. I’ve worked in technology. I’ve worked in banking.
The sector I’m really interested in that really makes a difference, those years were probably the ones where I said, that’s the one I really want to make the focus of my career going forward. So that would be probably a personal setback. Setback isn’t always the term. As they always say, you slam one door closed and six others open if you take the right approach. But that was a real turning point in terms of my commitment to that sector.
Michael (41:10)
And what would you say kind of is, would be your definition of working in climate more broadly? Because this is kind of a space that is seeing more and more people showing interest in it. You have just a proliferation of different platforms and training programs and convening bodies and whatnot. What does working in climate mean to you?
Susan (41:32)
That’s a really good question.
I see one bucket around energy, right? Different forms of energy, different ways of distributing energy, whether it’s electricity or whether it’s utilities or whether it’s energy sources or whether it’s energy storage or the whole range of how we get energy, how we use energy, how we share energy, and then how it’s being used in industry, right? How it’s being used in our homes, how it’s being used in a city.
It has a huge number of related areas.
I think the second big bucket has to do with these complicated systems with which we live. Transportation is about the energy transition, right? Whether it’s cars or ferries or trains or trucks or airplanes or taxis, all that area around transportation again is related to energy and again is related to climate emissions.
So if you’re working really hard, maybe not in terms of making the internal combustion engine look cooler, but maybe in terms of helping a Ford figure out their next generation EV and how to produce it so it actually can compete with the Chinese. A whole area around transportation and related industries, I think is the second bucket. And that gets you to the third bucket, right? Which is everything—you can make a really decent argument that almost everything we do, every industry we’re active in as a consumer at home, as somebody who works, as somebody with aspirations to make a difference, almost every industry is affected by climate. So I think to my mind, climate has to do with the transition of our fundamentals of our economic and our world around us.
And if you’re helping to drive that change, then you’re probably working in climate, not directly but indirectly. If you’re helping to keep things the way they have been in the past, you’re probably not.
Michael (43:55)
And climate, we were just discussing, is such a big space with so many different subfields and quite a sense of momentum behind it, of course, too, but also a feeling that every day is, you know, another step closer to a deadline or to an urgent goal that must be met. What do you think are the key qualities that people who are interested in working in climate sort of need to embody or need to cultivate?
Susan (44:24)
Well, the ones I talked about before, optimism, right? You gotta believe that you actually can change something or you’re gonna get really, really frustrated, right? Because it’s not all gonna work. Some things are not gonna happen the way you expect them to, whether that’s for your company or your personal career or your family or where you live. You have to be able to wake up every morning and be ready to sort of fight fiercely. So the connector to that is probably resilience, right? Which is a big term in climate, but is really important in this. You have to be able to, as you said, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and try it again. So optimism, resilience I think it is helpful if you have a decent toleration for change, right? Some people really don’t. They like things really clearly defined, whether it’s their role or their day or their path to work that they take every time or their schedule. COVID really brought that into highlight because we all had to deal with change right away. Some people embraced it and some people had a really hard time. So I say if you want to work in climate, optimism, resilience, and ability to deal with change are all incredibly important. I’d say two other things that I have found important. One is curiosity.
I’m curious to learn about this stuff. I got this huge stack of books that I’m valiantly attempting to read around everything from how can you use data visualization to express some of these change in ways that are compelling and actionable to how does actually next generation or enhanced geothermal work. So curiosity is going to help a lot.
And I think the final thing was a bit of faith in serendipity, right? That luck isn’t just something that happens. Serendipity is often the result of really hard work. The extra hours, the dedication, the openness. And I think serendipity will help in almost any career, but I think in areas related to climate, it’s especially important.
Michael (46:50)
Kind of just as a closing question, if you were to imagine yourself at the end of your career, although knowing you, think you’ll probably just work until you drop dead, what would you—what would you want people to say that your contribution was? To fighting climate change, perhaps, but also just more in general.
Susan (47:03)
That’s an appealing image, Michael. That’s pretty easy. It was accelerating change, right? That the work that I did, this serial conference entrepreneur niche that I seem to have fallen into, right? Made a difference in that it made change happen faster. Whether it was getting to scale or it was getting to a pilot, whether it was getting to market sizes that made a difference or getting things funded. Accelerating that is probably what I would like to be remembered for.
Michael (47:52)
Great. Thank you so much, Susan Kish. This was a wonderful interview.
Susan (47:57)
Michael, I’m delighted and I wish you the best of luck on this series. These are really good questions and hard questions and you ask them in a very thoughtful way. So thank you.
Michael (48:08)
Thank you very much.
Michael (48:11)
Climate Swings is produced, hosted, and edited by me, Michael Gold, with promotional support from climate education and action platform, Terra.do. Opinions expressed on the show are exclusively those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Terra.do, its founders or employees. Show notes, transcripts, and other material can be found on the podcast section of my website, wordclouds.consulting/climateswings.
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