About this episode
What happens when you combine NASA research experience, an abandoned PhD, and a passion for getting game-changing climate-tech out of labs and into the real world? Meet Anku Madan, Principal at Obvious Ventures, whose career has ricocheted from engineering metallic alloys to co-founding a startup that created date rape drug detection technology, before finally finding his sweet spot funding climate solutions that could help save our planet. Today, Anku hunts for breakthrough innovations in carbon removal, synthetic biology, and geothermal energy—backing founders who are tackling trillion-dollar problems with deep-tech solutions. His story shows how technical chops paired with business savvy can accelerate the climate tech revolution we desperately need.
Notes and resources
Full transcript
Michael Ethan Gold (00:00)
Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, KALW, for hosting. My name is Michael Gold. I’m the host of Climate Swings, a podcast about swinging to the next vine of sustainability in your career. It’s been out for about six months. I release every other Wednesday. You can find it anywhere in podcast world.
And if you want to subscribe, you can do so on my Substack, climateswings.substack.com. You can of course subscribe for free, but as an independent and non-ad-supported podcast, like there is an option to pay, but you know, to each their own. A little bit about me, I am a content media communications professional, formerly with Reuters and The Economist Group. Now I’m a freelancer. I’ve been doing this quite a bit
in my spare time, so to speak. And I am extremely excited today to be hosting ⁓ this episode with Anku Madan, who you are probably all here ⁓ to hear from. I like to start out basically just by asking my guests to provide their own brief introduction. I’m sure you all know from the event blurb that Anku is a principal at Obvious Ventures, but there’s clearly much more to that.
Anku, why don’t you just start out with ⁓ a brief potted history of your professional life and what you’re up to now.
Anku Madan (01:27)
Sure, and first of all, thank you all for joining and thank you Michael and KALW for hosting. This is really exciting. I’m excited to kind of go into some of the swings along the way to get to where I am now, but just a little bit of background.
As Michael mentioned, I’m Anku. I’m a principal with an early stage venture capital firm actually very close to here called Obvious Ventures. We are an early stage venture capital firm that invests into world positive companies across planetary, economic, and human health. And my background is as someone that has kind of been on a few different sides of the table, ⁓ I’m a material science engineer turned founder, turned investor. So that’s a little bit about how I got here.
Michael Ethan Gold (02:10)
Yeah, and this podcast is really meant to be retrospective and dive deep into your background and what made you you so you started in a started a PhD program. That’s right, but you didn’t finish that so let’s just start there and tell me about that time in your life and that experience and why you didn’t finish your PhD.
Anku Madan (02:33)
Yeah, it’s a good question and I’ll take it a step further and go one chapter before that, which is that, you know, the whole reason for getting a PhD or wanting to go after academia in the first place is that, you know, the plan had always been to go get a PhD, become a professor. Everyone has a plan and that plan only lasts so far as you take that
first step and then suddenly you get punched in the face as I think Mike Tyson once said. During undergrad I was doing research, I spent some time at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, did work on ternary intermetallic alloys, did a lot of other interesting research projects. And the one thing that kept coming up is that there were a lot of great innovations in the lab that weren’t making it into people’s hands. And this was a common theme across every single research project that I worked on. ⁓ look,
there are thermoelectric harvesters for really cool wearable health devices. Why aren’t they in people’s hands? Why aren’t people being able to use them? So that common theme persisted, and I actually stumbled into co-founding a company my senior year of undergrad. ⁓ That was what kicked off this whole, maybe my dream of becoming a professor is no longer the dream that I should be pursuing.
Michael Ethan Gold (03:47)
So was it kind of like the pursuit of innovation for innovation’s sake that drove you to like kind of discover new things? Like what at that time, I mean you co-founded a company as an undergrad, it’s not completely unusual but it’s not something that everybody does, right? What was the driving force behind that at the time?
Anku Madan (04:04)
Yeah, I think that everyone finds inspiration from others. And for me, I was really fortunate and I stumbled into ⁓ this young entrepreneurs group called the Kairos Society. And the Kairos Society was made up of hundreds of entrepreneurs from all around the world who are in their late teens, early 20s, and they were building companies. when you first see that something is possible, you start to reimagine what’s possible in your own life.
So I was 19 years old when I first had a chance to experience that community and I saw all these other 19, 20, 21 year olds starting companies and said, ⁓ I can do this too. And I went back to this annual gathering for one or two years and everyone else had companies but me. So there’s always an element of, okay, if everyone else has done it, why can’t I? And I just kind of navigated my way to looking for an opportunity to do that.
Kick off senior year at undergrad at NC State University and I joined a senior design class called the engineering entrepreneurs program that gives you a bit of a sandbox. They give you a sandbox to say go explore a bunch of different problems that you want to potentially work on solutions for, build a team around you, and then if you so choose, start a company and take it further. So that was the sandbox in which we first ended up starting the company. And I would say, you know, it started with being inspired by others and then
⁓ you have to look for the places that enable you to do the things you want to do.
Michael Ethan Gold (05:32)
Yeah,
and what was kind of like the thematic or the topical North Star? I mean, you obviously studied hard-tech science, essentially. Did you know, like, narrow did your focus get, and how quickly did it narrow?
Anku Madan (05:47)
Yeah,
think growing up there was this perception, there was something that I was always excited about which was engineering and science in general. And my parents had been very excited about this idea that I become either a lawyer or a doctor, ⁓ as was very common in my community. But I was always drawn to the engineering side and my dad had, you he’s been in the plastics industry as an engineer for 35 years. So I was like, nope, I’m gonna do the thing that you told me not to do, which is to become just like you dad.
And fast forward when I first went to college, I started studying originally chemical engineering and then I very quickly transitioned into material science. You know, that by itself wasn’t the end all be all. I didn’t want to become a material science engineer for just the sake of doing that. It was always about, what is the ⁓ most fundamental skill set that I can develop that will enable me to solve problems down the road? And I think, you know, I can look back and say I wasn’t this intentional at the time. I think that
either material science or electrical engineering would have been the two that fit my plan the best, and it just so happened that I got lucky and chose one of those.
Michael Ethan Gold (06:53)
Yeah, and so you started your own company as an undergraduate, but you obviously didn’t sort of pursue the entrepreneurial route right out of college. You did go into that PhD. So now can we get to what inspired that kind of swing away from entrepreneurialism for a while, which you actually ended up going back into.
Anku Madan (07:12)
Yeah, I think ⁓ my learning from first co-founding this company Undercover Colors was, you know, I was good enough in the lab that I could get a prototype stood up, get a version one out, version two out. That was enough for us to go raise early capital and start getting, you know, into people’s hands. But it wasn’t enough for a final production-ready product that we could take to contract manufacturers and really, really scale. So I hit my limits and
recognizing that I said, okay, it’s time to hire myself out of a job. So I hired a new CTO to come in and take over those responsibilities. And that’s when I went on to start the PhD because the goal was how do I build what I think is necessary, which is this technical skillset to then eventually be the technical co-founder of more startups to come. But, you know, what hasn’t caught up with me yet was that my dream of one day becoming an academic or a researcher had really shifted to
maybe I’m actually better at the business side of science. That realization would come later after a couple of years in the PhD program.
Michael Ethan Gold (08:15)
What you didn’t mention is that Undercover Colors was developing a date rape detection drug. Is that right? We were… I see. ⁓ A date rape drug detection… There we go. Okay. Now I’ve got the flow correct. So what happened to that technology?
Anku Madan (08:21)
developing nail polishes that detects date rape drugs.
Yeah, we were, you know, when we first had this idea, it stemmed from, of course, the problem. ⁓ My four, my three co-founders and I, so the four of us total, were thinking about different problems that we had a personal connection to, and we realized that we had this crazy thing in common, which is that we all knew somebody who had been, ⁓ who had gone through this problem of drug-facilitated sexual assault. That is a crazy thing to have in common when you’re seniors in college. So
we thought about it, like, okay, let’s spend some time ideating and thinking about solutions. We had a bunch of crazy ideas and Steve was just like, what if we make a nail polish? We laughed him off, we’re like, that’s a dumb idea. Why would we ever do that? The next day, we actually all came back to him and said, this is actually a really interesting idea. Let’s spend some more time thinking about it and starting to develop it. So that’s how it all came to be. And fast forward, you know, six to 12 months, we had prototypes, we had raised some additional capital
initial capital from the university to go pursue as part of a fellowship program and we ended up raising the seed round that Mark Cuban ended up investing in as a part of that and unexpectedly we got a lot of press. Hundreds of news articles, Good Morning America sent someone down to interview us and we said we don’t have anything yet, we don’t have this concept, we don’t yet have a prototype, we don’t have a product, we’re years away from being on shelves, can you come back to us in a few years once we’re ready for you?
Unfortunately, you can’t necessarily, the world doesn’t do things according to what you want it to do. And we weren’t ready for the press then, but we took advantage of it and were able to kind of use that to recruit. And yeah, it was a great stepping off point to start the company. Fast forward a few years, we launched our first product, not nail polish, but something that was effective and worked for 99.3%
accuracy, worked for 10 different drugs, and it was really effective. We scaled it into the market, ⁓ hit a couple million in sales, and yeah, we launched in the market. Now the company has shut down as of a couple of years ago because it is really challenging to have a D to C, or direct to consumer business, during the pandemic. Overall, lot of great learnings, and I was very privileged to be a part of the journey.
Michael Ethan Gold (10:49)
So after you stopped your PhD and you decided you wanted to focus more on the business side of science as you were kind of saying, talk about just a couple of the roles that you took at that time.
Anku Madan (11:01)
Yeah, I
think that after I left the PhD, I wanted to get back into building something again. The pace of academia was something that was no longer for me. And where best to do that, but at a startup. So ⁓ I was able to find a company called Propel(x) that was an angel investment platform that was looking to catalyze more capital being invested into deep tech companies, companies that working on novel therapeutics, novel solutions for climate change. And that was my first kind of…
look, if you, know, this idea of reallocating or helping to ⁓ shift the flow of capital into these really important technologies, that was what Propel(x) was doing. So that is what really, really got my gears turning and then kind of helped me pivot eventually into full-time ⁓ being an investor. First at Plug and Play and then at Hitachi Ventures ⁓ before joining Obvious.
Michael Ethan Gold (11:53)
So what does deep tech mean? I think a lot of people here kind of have an understanding, but can you explain a little bit more about what that means?
Anku Madan (12:01)
Sure. So I think deep tech fundamentally is this idea that there are new technological innovations that are being developed by researchers, whether it’s in academia or in national labs, or even nowadays in big corporations. Originally even in private research labs like Bell Labs back in the 90s. Deep tech, whenever there’s this new fundamental innovation, it takes a lot of capital, it takes a lot of effort to then scale up and get that innovation out of the lab into people’s hands.
But deep tech is this fundamentally new thing, new insight that’s unlocked by researchers. It’s this new thing that needs to ⁓ rolled out into people’s hands. That’s kind of what I think of as a definition of deep tech. Some of the companies that today we see as beneficiaries of commercializing some sort of new technology are companies like SpaceX, companies like Tesla that had fundamental innovations on battery chemistry. ⁓
There are great examples from the 80s and 90s like Genentech and others that kind of founded the original origins of Silicon Valley. Those are some of the things that I think of as deep tech.
Michael Ethan Gold (13:09)
Can you talk about some of the deep tech innovations or sort of pathways that you were interested in, especially in that early time? Because what you’re doing now is pretty different than developing a date rape drug detection nail polish. So how did you weave your way through these different deep tech innovations?
Anku Madan (13:25)
Yeah, in the end, deep tech or innovation is just a tool. It’s a tool to solve a problem. And that was something I’d learned ⁓ from my time in Undercover Colors. And the question was, OK, great. I appreciate that solving problems is really important. I like the idea of using new technological innovations to help solve those problems. What is the problem that I want to dedicate the rest of my life to? everyone has been hearing about global warming, about climate change for a very long time.
It wasn’t until actually in middle school I first watched An Inconvenient Truth I’m sure many folks in the audience have watched it, I’m sure. ⁓ When you first see the chart of global CO2 levels, that chart of this line is going up and to the right, it had a pretty profound impact on my life. And fast forward eight to 10 years later when I’m in my professional career, I was looking for an opportunity to come back to that. So that’s what catalyzed kind of
my next couple of jumps into Plug and Play and Hitachi where I said, okay, how do I get closer and closer and closer to directly working with people that are solving climate change?
Michael Ethan Gold (14:33)
Yeah, I’ve heard many people ⁓ name drop An Inconvenient Truth as kind of their sort of come to Jesus moment when it comes to climate, but it did take you a little while. I you didn’t you didn’t go into sort of sustainability, earth technologies or anything like that as an undergraduate or even really as a ⁓ as a graduate student. So how did that how did that spark occur when you were at Plug and Play and then Hitachi? You just sort of wanted it bad enough and just started doing it or how did that happen? Yeah.
Anku Madan (15:01)
I
mean, think you start with the things that you know. And at Plug and Play, I was working on finding founders that were working on new materials and packaging technologies. is the world that I knew well because my dad was in the plastic space. And I was thinking about, OK, what are the opportunities that we have here to help scale new projects, new technologies, to help reduce the impact of plastics on the environment? And that was the first kind of ⁓ foray into combating climate change.
When I was looking to join Hitachi Ventures, I specifically said, okay, I’m looking for something that is directly head-on in climate and you know, there are no more compromises. I’ve been adjacent enough for a little while that it’s time to really, really take the full jump and join the fight.
Michael Ethan Gold (15:49)
Yeah, and what does climate tech mean to you kind of as a thinker about it, as someone who works on it? Is it a well-defined sector? Is it kind of a misnomer? I what are your thoughts about that?
Anku Madan (16:01)
I think that ⁓ depending on who you ask, you’ll get different answers to this question. But climate tech is this idea that new technical innovations, new business models, new businesses can help really impact or solve for different parts of the systemic problem that is climate change. Climate change isn’t just one thing. It is…
It is a big impact that is happening because of human and our society’s impact on the systems around us. So there’s no one silver bullet. There are a lot of different solutions that will be needed across agriculture, across mobility, across energy. And when I think about climate tech, it’s a very multivariable approach to solving each of those individual challenges. Thousands of people, millions of people will be working on and are working on solving them kind of individually in their own lives and
in their own ways.
Michael Ethan Gold (16:52)
And then
there’s also climate deep tech, essentially, right, which is sort of your focus area. So it means ⁓ digging deep into the supply chain of these climate technologies and working on innovations there, essentially. Is that right?
Anku Madan (17:05)
Yeah, I would give one really great example. You said digging deep, so maybe we’ll go to geothermal as an example of this. ⁓ One of our portfolio companies at Obvious Ventures is called Zanscar. And Zanscar is leveraging a ⁓ unique technical insight, which is that ⁓ geothermal power, which has gotten from basically drilling deep holes and using ⁓ circulating water or other types of fluids to basically…
collect power from the heat of the Earth’s core, or maybe not all the way to the core, but least lower in the Earth’s crust. So geothermal energy is something that’s really exciting. It’s baseload, which means it’s firm power, and it’s zero carbon.
But it’s been held back for a long time because it’s been really hard to find these geothermal resources. We know where some of them are because they exist in geysers like at Yellowstone and other places, but finding the other resources is really difficult. So the fundamental insight that Zanskar had as a deep tech company is that they said, okay, what if we can use new data sets about the subsurface characteristics of different places around the country to find them without having to drill a bunch of holes?
And that totally changes the ecosystem. It makes it possible to not go around and drill hundreds of holes to find a geothermal well, but rather to do prospecting in silico or via computer models. And that completely changes the economics. So that’s an example of a company where we are changing the paradigm for how we think about geothermal energy because of this research that was done on the basis of a technical insight from founders that were doing their PhD at Stanford.
Michael Ethan Gold (18:42)
So at Hitachi, you really kind of went deep into climate deep tech essentially, right? What were your main pathways that you wanted to explore? I there’s a lot that you could do and you came from a fairly kind of diverse background, so you could probably weave your way into any one of them, but what were the main sort of ⁓ levers for change that you were interested in?
Anku Madan (19:06)
I think that everybody who spends time in climate tech will eventually look at the wheel. They’ll look at where emissions come from and where capital is going and say, okay, there’s a mismatch, for example, in agriculture. ⁓ What are ways that start-ups specifically can actually impact the problem? So what I was first doing, I did the same thing. I looked at the wheel and said, okay, there’s a lot of money going to mobility. ⁓ Maybe investing in the next new electric vehicle company is not the way that I can make the
impact, but are there novel ways in mobility, are there novel ways in energy, like for example in geothermal or nuclear, or are there other categories that are under invested in where the incremental dollar into a new technology or approach can have an outsizing impact. So that was the framework that we used.
Michael Ethan Gold (19:53)
and what were kind of the ones that you guys identified.
Anku Madan (19:56)
I think two
of the sectors that I feel are really exciting and have had their fits and starts in the market but are really, really promising in the long term are sectors like carbon dioxide removal, CDR, and synthetic biology. When we think about the Silicon Age of manufacturing over last 20 to 30 years,
There are things that we’ve gotten really good at. We’ve gotten great at engineering. And one of the things we’ve gotten better and better at engineering over recent years is biology. We can now engineer biology. We can engineer yeast strains or other types of strains to actually give us stuff. That is fundamentally reshaping the supply chains. It’s fundamentally reshaping the way we produce goods and consume them. So synthetic biology was a sector that we spent a lot of time thinking about and made multiple investments in. One of the companies is doing
something called continuous fermentation and they’re actually based in Berkeley. ⁓ Another area that I mentioned is CDR or carbon removal and you know when you look at the math of how many gigatons of emissions we produce as a society there are two ways to solve it. Either you take the plus side and make it less of a plus or you take the minus side which currently is effectively zero and you increase that. So thinking about negative emissions technologies and how to scale them up to the gigatons scale ⁓ one of the companies
we invested in is called Captura and they’re leveraging a novel technique to split basically sea water into acid and base and that actually allows the oceans to take in more carbon than they do already which is you know the ocean is the biggest carbon sink out there and if you can accelerate or give it superpowers and let it take down even more carbon that’s really exciting. So those are the types of things that we spend time on.
Michael Ethan Gold (21:40)
And
so after a couple years at Hitachi, you made the swing into Obvious Ventures. Can you just talk a little bit more about Obvious and what you do there and kind of the big picture of your work right now? Yeah.
Anku Madan (21:52)
Yeah, I think that the mission at Obvious Ventures is really what drew me to the firm. As I mentioned at beginning, we are focused on world positive companies that are solving humanity’s greatest challenges. These are in trillion dollar industries like supply chain. They’re in food systems, in robotics, and specifically the opportunity to focus on planetary health and the climate and industrials. How do we refactor the way we do manufacturing? How do we refactor the way we collect energy from the world? ⁓
These were the problems that I was excited to kind of double down on here at Obvious. And they have a great track record. That was the other thing. ⁓ Obvious was an early investor in companies like Beyond Meat, which was reimagining the way we think about collecting food or creating food for mass consumption. So this proof point or this track record of, OK, let’s take a different lens and look at these problems from a first principles perspective, that was what really got me excited.
Michael Ethan Gold (22:49)
And what are the main themes that you’re looking at? What’s kind of your, I guess, day-to-day like? Yeah.
Anku Madan (22:56)
The day to day can be pretty frenetic. I think this week is San Francisco Climate Week and there are 550 events that are going on concurrently all around the city.
Day to day, it’s a combination of going to events, looking for founders, doing diligence, building up an expert network so that you can quickly collect information on where and how to best deploy that capital that our LPs have given us. ⁓ It’s really a mixture of, I joke that one of the best things that an investor can be is really good at context switching and also just…
If your brain is in million places at once, there’s a good chance that you might be a decent investor because as long as you can keep those threads going, that’s, you know, I have 150 tabs open in my browser right now and every single one of those tabs to do, it’s a mess. But, you know, that is a lot of what the day-to-day looks like.
Michael Ethan Gold (23:50)
Do you find that a lot of people who go into roles like yours, especially in the deep tech side, have technological background skills? Like is it more that they will come from like a founder business background, more from a tech background, a little bit of both, a little bit of everything? What do you usually see?
Anku Madan (24:08)
Yeah, we see a little bit of everything, both on the investor side and on the startup side. I think, you know, one of the frameworks that I think about is founder market fit when we’re looking for new investments. And sometimes for a founder to be a good fit for the industry they’re solving, they have to be a domain expert. They don’t always have to be. Sometimes it’s about, I’m really excited about this problem,
and I’m great at recruiting. You know, I think the one thing that is always consistent and outlasts everything else is passion for a problem. You you don’t have to be a, you know, fifth generation farmer to want to care about or want to solve the big problems we face in agriculture. But you do have to be really good at finding experts to support your vision. So whether it’s that direct founder-market fit or the ability to recruit people who can buy into and help support your vision, those are the two types of things that, you know, I
tend to see more of. And the same thing goes for the investor side as well.
Michael Ethan Gold (25:04)
So, saying constantly a world positive technology, I there’s so many definitions that could fall under that and climate tech is obviously sort of one slice of that. How do you and how does Obvious kind of paint a coherent picture of what world positive really means with climate tech as a focus of that amidst all these other like, you health and other kinds of technologies?
Anku Madan (25:26)
Totally, and I would say that in the end, this is subjective. There is a spectrum of very, very, very world positive all the way through to world negative. I think the things that we will not do are things that we see as bad for humanity. There are lots and lots of ways to make money.
But for example, the next vape pen for toddlers is not the type of thing that Obvious Ventures would get excited about. Within the realm of planetary health or economic health, things like SMB enablement or access, one of our early investments was a company called Gusto that made it possible for any small business to have a payroll provider in their back, in their corner basically. So things like that that are either enabling broader access for SMBs or ⁓ making it possible for consumers
to decarbonize individual life choices, for example with mobility or energy, those are the types of things where we see the ⁓ decision becomes pretty clear.
Michael Ethan Gold (26:24)
So is there like a clear criteria for especially the climate tech that you work on in terms of it has to, you know, by a certain time contribute this much toward global net zero or I don’t know, you know, what is the criteria that you look at?
Anku Madan (26:39)
Yeah, I think there are lot of firms that do look at these impact criteria. How many megatons of carbon are you ⁓ basically mitigating by a certain point? We don’t necessarily have those same ⁓ quantifiable frameworks, but our fundamental belief is that scale begets impact. If we believe that a company is solving a massive hair on fire problem for consumers or for farmers or for ⁓ people in the electric vehicle industry, then it’s something that will experience widespread adoption. And if people are
adopting it and are paying for it, that is something where now, rather than focusing on decarbonizing or helping a few thousand people or tens of thousands of people, now we can really make megaton or gigaton scale impact for a really, really important problem.
Michael Ethan Gold (27:24)
And climate tech has not always been the most smooth, straight, up and to the right kind of space. I mean, what are the big things that you are feeling now about how the sector is going? ⁓ You can talk generally speaking, but also maybe in some of the spaces that you look at. I know on your LinkedIn talk about ⁓ nuclear fission and batteries and grid transmission technologies. How are those looking alongside the bigger climate tech trajectory?
Anku Madan (27:52)
That’s a great question. There are there definitely have been cycles in climate tech I think with the way I think about it is that you know there are cycles of innovation where we come up with new technologies and then oftentimes you know, there’s a lot of exuberance around that we can look at, know the late aughts as an example of this for solar. Everyone was very excited about solar and it took another 10 plus years before we got to the point where look you know, even though a lot of those companies back then ended up going
bankrupt, solar as an industry has thrived. And now today we look at new generation capacity and it’s mostly solar. It’s the cheapest thing. When I think about the current administration and some of the headwinds that we face in climate, the economic script has flipped. It is no longer possible to say anything other than…
renewables are inevitable. It is happening. They are cheaper. They are cheaper than coal. They are cheaper ⁓ in many, many districts, cheaper than even gas, natural gas. So I think that it’s important to have those innovation cycles because they’re very quickly followed by deployment cycles. And we are now in a deployment cycle for solar. So the question is, in the midst of this innovation cycle for, ⁓ you know, the same thing happened in EVs. In the midst of this innovation cycle for the next generation technologies, the question is, which ones will emerge
as the beginnings of the deployment cycle for the next 10 to 20 years.
Michael Ethan Gold (29:19)
There’s a lot that can keep a climate tech person or climate person up at night. What generally, I mean for you, you talk in a very, you generally have an optimistic attitude, I think a lot of climate people do, but I’m just curious, know, what most keeps you up at night?
Anku Madan (29:31)
I think you definitely have to be an optimist to be in this space. What keeps me up at night is that we’re just not moving fast enough. There are people on the ground, founders and people that are policy makers and…
NGOs, nonprofits, etc. that are all focused on this goal of decarbonizing and helping to solve climate change. And there won’t be a day that we wake up and say, we’ve done it, we’ve solved climate change. Maybe it’ll happen in 20, maybe it’ll happen in 30 years. But the longer we wait, the more difficult it becomes. And I think this is where this idea of waiting until the right time, that’s just not something we can do. And we just have to be faster. We have to go… It has to be a full court press today.
Michael Ethan Gold (30:18)
And there’s also a sense that climate tech and working in climate has an intrinsic virtue to it and people do it because they’re mission driven and they’re purpose driven. But obviously you’re an investor and you have to answer to limited partners, you have to make money and climate tech in general has to sort of exist in the capitalist world that we live in. How do you and Obvious in general think about, you know, both maintaining that sort of higher purpose as well as, you know, delivering returns? Sometimes in climate tech can…
take a lot longer than in other ⁓ sectors of technology.
Anku Madan (30:50)
Totally.
And in the end, there has to be a willingness to pay to solve a problem. That is one of the things, you know, for a venture to work, people have to be willing to pay for a solution. And, you know, we’re still as an industry, as a subsector of venture capital, we’re still proving that climate venture capital is a good way to make money. That is something, you know, the more companies that exit over the coming years, I think ⁓ that is better, right? Rivian, which is a great electric vehicle maker, they just had their first profitable
quarter very recently and that’s great. We need more case studies like that. We need more examples of climate forward companies that are actually experiencing great outcomes for there to be a flywheel of new founders, for there to be a flywheel of new capital flowing into the industry. I think that it’s early innings but we need way more examples than we have so far.
Michael Ethan Gold (31:39)
Yeah, I mean at the same time like any startup sector you’re have a lot more failures than successes and climate tech presumably even more. How do you motivate the founders you talk to? How do you keep stay motivated yourself? Like where does the sort of well of optimism you say come from?
Anku Madan (31:57)
The good thing is that I stay motivated because I talk to founders. It’s actually the complete way around, other way around where I’m not the one motivating them. They’re typically the ones motivating me. When you talk to somebody or, you know, tens of people on a regular basis that are dedicating their entire lives, they’ve often quit really cushy jobs in other places or decided to take a sabbatical and said, okay, I’ve done the thing and I’m ready. Like it’s too big of a problem to ignore. I’m ready to dedicate my entire life to, you know, helping solve the fertilizer issue
in agriculture or whatever it is, that is inspiring. And being surrounded by and talking to people that are doing that type of thing on a regular basis, it’s impossible not to be an optimist.
Michael Ethan Gold (32:38)
Do you think you might want to found your own company again someday?
Anku Madan (32:43)
One day.
Michael Ethan Gold (32:44)
What? And what, do you have any ideas kicking around or anything like that?
Anku Madan (32:50)
Not yet. I think that every day new problems emerge. ⁓ Climate change is a multi-decadal problem that we will be solving for. And I don’t know what that thing will be. It’ll happen.
Michael Ethan Gold (33:06)
Yeah, yeah, okay, all right. You heard it here first. ⁓ Now one thing that I like to explore on this podcast is kind of the idea of climate communities and how people build community. What are some of the experiences you’ve had with mentorship, either being mentored into kind of a climate lens, a climate role, also mentoring others? I mean, you talk about your experience with the founders just now, but if you could talk about mentorship a little bit, that would be great.
Anku Madan (33:30)
Great. Yeah, I think that mentorship starts really, really early on and I was really fortunate. you know, was shameless in my reach outs when I was first thinking about both getting into venture and getting into climate. you know, anyone who is interested in learning wants to learn from others and what has come before. And one of the ones I always think about is there was a newsletter I used to follow and a gentleman wrote a wonderful blog post about how he thought about
deep tech venture capital. And it was this idea of using the technology readiness level framework that NASA has for how to advance technologies down the development pipeline as a diligence framework for how to know which companies and when to invest in them. And in my head I was like, oh my gosh, this is exactly how I think about it. I should reach out. So I was like, hey, Tim, would you want to get coffee with me sometime next time I’m in Boston? And he responded, we had a coffee, and he’s the person who ended up referring me to my first job in venture capital. And it’s little things like that that
I’ve had the benefit of working with lot of mentors like him and others. Whenever somebody reaches out to me with a targeted email and says, hey, you’re a material scientist that went into venture or that is working on climate, help me understand how I view it. I have a personal goal of helping convince or helping guide at least five of my friends every single year into climate-related jobs. I think this is the third year
that I’m doing this. The last two years I have hit the target. This year I’m at two out of five. So that is something that, you know, I see that as part of my responsibility of being in the climate sphere is to help guide more people into it as well.
Michael Ethan Gold (35:09)
Actually, that’s really interesting. You have this numerical target for people you want to get into climate. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anything like that. What are some of the things you do to help them do that?
Anku Madan (35:22)
A lot of it, especially in venture capital, your network is your currency. Whenever there are portfolio companies that are looking for really good sales leaders, or if they’re looking for, for example, somebody who’s a really good embedded software engineer. I have folks from my network, both from high school, college, or even after that, that I think about it, and like, look, you are looking for a job,
would you potentially try to get a job in climate instead of that other thing that you were thinking about doing. So some of it is just being opportunistic about when people are already making shifts. And some of it is, people that I think would just be really, really good in climate if they were to make the shift ⁓ and just working them slowly over many, many, years.
Michael Ethan Gold (36:04)
Well, was there like any like particular anecdote like would you have like a decade long kind of and then finally like it happened.
Anku Madan (36:12)
I had a friend that was already working in the EV space and went to go work at one of the major tech companies in their cloud division. And I said, OK, I’m going to get him back into climate. And through an introduction, was able to convince him, hey, carbon accounting is really, really exciting. And I think your skill set would be perfect. He ended up getting the job and making the shift back into the industry. So there are a bunch of small stories like that, but we need more.
Michael Ethan Gold (36:40)
So you said that you might one day start your own thing again, but do you think that in the deep tech space in general there are other problems not in climate that you also would feel passionate to solve? I mean, you’re definitely allowed to say that just because it’s a climate podcast.
Anku Madan (36:58)
Yeah, I think that ⁓ there is a really big opportunity right now with, ⁓ agentic AI is actually a really interesting proposition because we’re finally getting to a point where we can ask AI to do things for us. in software land that’s really, really great and a lot of stuff is being done. I think when I get excited when the bits meet the atoms.
And a good example of this are companies that doing something called generative science. And that’s one of our core thesis areas at Obvious is looking for companies that are accelerating the pace of science so that they can accelerate the pace of deploying new innovations. ⁓ Companies that are saying, hey, what if I had a robotic lab?
and a agentic AI in the background that does simulation of new material science, for example. I think if you look at every major big transition in human society, it’s been catalyzed by the discovery of or the development of a new material class, the Silicon Age, the one we’re in now, and there will be more in the future.
I think that discovery of new materials and accelerating that discovery, that’s a huge, huge problem. It’s really hard to do. And there are material scientists that dedicate their entire lives to a very, very single narrow problem. And being able to do what they do, but 500 times over and making it possible for scientists to say, let me do the thinking, let me do the ideating about which material classes to go after. This AI plus robot, go do the work. I think that’s really, really promising.
Michael Ethan Gold (38:27)
So kind of a more general purpose digital AI driven materials pathway.
Anku Madan (38:33)
Exactly. Discovery, screening, development, manufacturing. You have to do all of it, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity that’s unexplored.
Michael Ethan Gold (38:40)
But of course it’s still relevant to climate, know, potentially a couple steps down the chain. Yeah, exactly. Just a couple more general questions. I like to ask all my guests and then we’ll open it up to the audience. What would you say are some of the main connective threads that have linked the various swings that you’ve made? Because again, you come from a background that’s fair, that’s somewhat different than what you’re doing now, I would say, right?
Anku Madan (39:01)
In a lot of ways, think that fundamentally the thing that is different is that I’m no longer doing science on a day-to-day basis. Having that background enables me to gain founder trust, is what makes me good at my job. When I talk to a founder that has been, for example, that is coming out of a PhD program saying, hey, this thing I have done in the lab is really interesting. Do you think it’s worth building company around? They trust me to give them guidance because I’ve been in their shoes. ⁓
I’m not doing the same thing on a day-to-day basis. I think that having that background is what enables me to do what I do. But I think the common thread that is kind of pulls everything together, it comes down to, you ⁓
Having the tools, like the tools were what I worked on first and I didn’t have a clear sense earlier in my career of what I wanted to focus on. But once it was clear to me that climate was the thing that got me really excited and to me felt like a big enough problem to sink my teeth into and not just, it wasn’t something I could do and then tangibly fix by the next day. That would be great, but it’s not possible. So I think like having a big, big problem, once that happened, that’s the common thread that I think every single step, at least for the foreseeable future, until I can say, ta-da, we did it.
That’s going to be the common thread.
Michael Ethan Gold (40:17)
Yeah, and
looking back over your career so far, what are a couple of things that you would want to have known? You can tell it to your college self, maybe your first company founder self, your PhD self, what are a couple things you would have wanted to know at that time?
Anku Madan (40:34)
Yeah, I think that one of them is just always take the swing. You never know what you’re gonna learn if someone doesn’t respond to you, or if they do respond to you, or do the project, just always do the thing, because there’s almost the asymmetric upside that you can get from just trying. That’s always worth it. So I think that’s one of them. The other thing is that I think…
It took me a long time to realize that success is a multi-dimensional framework. ⁓
I think it would be, depending on who you ask, my first venture, the startup that I worked on, was a failure. It was a commercial failure. But it was a huge success in terms of teaching me and my co-founders how to build a business the right way. So I think thinking about success and how every single learning, every single thing that you do, every single experience you have will be somehow a success because you take away learnings from it. I think that would have been a, I wish I had learned that earlier in my career.
Michael Ethan Gold (41:32)
Yeah, and then casting your mind, I guess, to the end of your career. And of course, you know, we’re a long, long way away, knock wood, of course. But what would you want people to say about you? What would you want your epitaph to be about, you know, your contribution toward fighting climate change, toward the things you care about in general?
Anku Madan (41:52)
I think there’s this theme around progress and not perfection, learning velocity, just trying. ⁓ He gave it his all. I really tried. That would be the thing that I hope is captured.
Michael Ethan Gold (42:04)
Great, excellent. All right, well, thank you so much, Anku Madan, for appearing on Climate Swings. This was wonderful.
I think it’s audience Q&A time. We have about 15, 20 minutes. Great.
Anku Madan (42:27)
Thanks, Matt. Just with your mentioning before your interest or past interest in packaging and plastics, I just landed in things that need to expand my style. We do a reasonable alternative to the single-use stretch wrap used for pallets, alongside building up automation and return systems. Do you see circular economy coming bit more to the forefront as like an important solution to climate, given the amount of carbon embedded in materials?
I would love for it to be, and I think inevitably, again, that’s the key thing that’s true, is that a problem or a solution has to be inevitable. And I think in this case, it is inevitable. The question is timing. And this is where, when I think about why haven’t things been faster, or why haven’t customers, or why haven’t people been pushing more on solving the packaging crisis, ⁓ part of it is that we innovated ourselves into a corner.
You know, typically for something new to be adopted has to be either better or it has to be cheaper. Plastic, traditional plastics are really, really cheap and they are really, really good. They’re a wonder material. And I think this is where, you know, when you find yourself in a corner, an innovation corner like that, I do think there’s a huge opportunity here for policy holders or policymakers, I should say, to try and ⁓ get us out of the corner by either, you know, making it more expensive to make plastics or to pollute. ⁓ This is an opportunity for policy to really kind of come
to the forefront so that new technologies can ⁓ become successful. I would like for that to happen more and more, but there is increasing pressure. So I think it’s inevitable. ⁓ Hopefully it’ll happen much, much faster.
Elizabeth Shustler, I work in behavior and I was in conversations yesterday with ⁓
AI tech companies and a bunch of folks and there were like every solution table included behavior on the like sticky notes of solutions and yet the people that like talked about it said I don’t believe it happens and so what do you tell your companies your venture clients that are at a point where their success depends on behavior? How do they get over that?
I think behavioral choices are really hard to influence.
This is something that ⁓ everyone talked about the green premium for a long time. There are consumers that are able to take on the financial burden of buying the more expensive detergent or making that more eco-conscious choice. But a lot of folks aren’t able to make that same choice. So this is where I think the burden to some extent is both on consumers to change behaviors whenever possible, but also on the suppliers of those products, the suppliers of the services. ⁓
If you make, if you kind of go upstream and say, look,
instead of buying an RV that is powered by gas, here’s an EV trailer that’s a better product at the same price. It has to be a no-brainer. How do you make it a no-brainer solution or a no-brainer choice? That is kind of where I see a lot of the opportunity. But there is a lot of opportunity also in just ⁓ changing consumer choices. It’s hard. That’s one I will leave to the behavioral theory folks and choice theory people.
Hi, my name is Danish Meir and I have spent over a decade in ESG reporting and carbon accounting space lately with software and AI tools. My question is about the investment side. You lately there has been a lot of interest in building these tools, especially automation AI. So from the investment side, how do you make sure to differentiate between the real thing and AI wash or? ⁓
In my space, I see a lot of wash over because I know how it works and how much optimization is possible. what’s advertised is way beyond. So from investment side, how do you make sure that it’s distinctive?
I think ⁓ one of the things that I’m expected to do in my day job is to just get really smart on things as quickly as possible. I knew nothing about AI a year or two ago, but every single day we wake up and say, okay, what is something I don’t know today that I need to know to be able to make a better decision down the road? I think in an ideal world, every single investor is educated and says, okay, ⁓ this claim is, or this company is doing AI washing and they’re making it seem like they can do
more than they can. In the end, it just comes down to diligence. I think that we have a really high bar for diligence at our firm, and we hope that we see that from our co-investors, from other folks down the road. And it’s hard because it’s not consistent.
But I think in the end, this hype cycle that we’re seeing right now with AI and deploying into every single aspect of our lives, it will come to bear and eventually no one’s gonna talk about AI. It’s no one’s gonna talk, it’s the same way with big data many years ago where everyone said, big data, it’s gonna be everywhere. And it is everywhere, we just don’t talk about it anymore. It’s the same thing with AI, we talk about it today, we won’t in two to three years.
it just will be kind of ingrained in the fabric of wherever it is appropriate, whenever it improves the workflow and whether it improves kind of somebody’s ability to use a product, it will be there. We just won’t talk about it.
Name, question. My name is Jordan Hammond. I wanted to ask you ⁓ with your portfolio at Obvious, do you see a consistent thread with the ones that are the most stand out or that you consider the most successful, at least to this point? Or is it all just of unique to the company in the space?
I think that the one common thread is always just team. ⁓ If you have an incredible team that can, you know, ⁓ duck with the punches and know when and how to change,
change or pivot, that is the common thread that we always see. Companies that have great teams can take a B plus technology or an A minus technology and win. ⁓ A team that isn’t able to necessarily adapt to the market in the same way, they tend to struggle. So I think that’s definitely the one common theme. But even with an A plus team, if the market shifts against you, it’s really, really, really hard to battle uphill. So it ends up being team first. That’s our number one underwriting criteria.
But after that, you just never know. So there’s always a little bit of luck involved.
Any last questions or? Yep, right back here. I’m gonna go back and then I’ll come forward.
Hey, my name is Sivanth. I’m just curious, do you see any ⁓ major like tailwinds in the solar industry outside of maybe the material space, maybe from a government incentive standpoint or just in terms of PR application of AI or? ⁓
other things. So basically tooling, linking with existing solar systems that are driving efficiency and how that would translate moving forward as well. Yeah, I think that when I think about whether solar is a venture category, I think venture capital is great for bringing new technologies or new types of business models and scaling them up. And then at that point, growth equity and other types of capital can come in and help them scale. The two things that I’ve seen that are relatively new in
solar are robotics for deployment of solar much more quickly and much more effectively and safely. So robotics I think will be, know, especially in the face of a decreasing labor force for solar deployment, we’re going to see robotic systems be deployed much more widely. And the other thing actually I learned just yesterday is ⁓
as we see more more frequent hailstorms, hailstorms are really bad for solar farms, right? They come in, they break the glass, and then you have lost output, and that’s really bad for the solar operator. It’s bad for the customers that are taking advantage of that green power. ⁓ So companies like Nextracker have actually developed these tracking mounts that now, if you know, for example, 10 minutes or 20 minutes or half an hour before a hailstorm is about to happen, you can turn the solar panel sideways, and now you reduce the risk that
you’re going to damage your solar farm. So I think things like that, know, rolling out a reducing risk across portfolios of solar projects or deploying them much more quickly, those to me are two big opportunities in solar.
Hey, my name is Steve and I work in product at a battery materials company. I’m really curious about how Obvious’s investment thesis is approaching deep tech and hard tech, I mean given the conversation around how long returns can be to actually make money. How is obvious kind of change your game on that or how are you guys thinking when you’re looking through your portfolio? What’s the like time scale for returns that you’re really evaluating for?
Michael Ethan Gold (51:25)
I mean ⁓
Thank
Anku Madan (51:41)
I think there are two things that everyone tries to optimize for, one of which is time and one of which is capital. And I do think there’s a myth out there that I want to try and dispel, which is that deep tech is super, super capital intensive. It is capital intensive, but it’s not any more or less capital intensive than the software companies that have dominated the landscape for the last 20 to 30 years. If you look at big companies today like Uber, that is primarily what folks would think of as an asset light or capital
light strategy, they raised and spent billions and billions of dollars to get to profitability. The same thing is true for deep tech companies. I think that, you know, there is often this ⁓ bogey man around the deep tech problem of, you need to raise billions of dollars to build plants. You know, you’re just taking a different kind of risk. There’s technical risk and there’s market risk. In a company where you’re building software or a capital light solution, you probably have more competitors and you’re taking that market risk of which one or who is
going to break through? In a deep tech company you’re taking technical risks. Can they build the thing that they say they can build? And if they do, generally there tends to be a buyer, right? You’re either in energy or you’re in commodities where, you know, if you can provide more electrons for the grid, there’s someone to buy it. So I think that there are two different types of risk and at least that’s the way we think about it is, when can we come in where our capital is going to provide the most leverage for this company to, you know, have the most impact?
One more in the back and then one more in the front.
Michael Ethan Gold (53:16)
Hi, my name is Mathieu. I co-founded a brand strategy and storytelling agency in San Francisco. And I had a question. As we all kind of know, the way VC invests, it’s like high risk, high reward, high pressure.
And there’s been very notable cases in the past of ⁓ companies, startups, selling things that they were not delivering and kind of getting stuck into reinforcement, trying to prove something really wrong. I’m thinking this like when that happens to kind of like crypto company or kind of like a gaming company, it has a certain set of impact.
But I’m thinking that if that happens to company that says, we’re developing a way to filter ocean water, remove microplastic, or mitigate the amount of carbon that’s released by massive factory, probably the impact could be really devastating. So I was curious to know, do you have ways to kind of mitigate this kind of risk generally?
Anku Madan (54:26)
Yeah, I mean, I the easiest way to mitigate is to have more and more solutions out there. You know, in Europe, there was a big story recently, a company called Northvolt declared bankruptcy after raising, you know, over $10 billion, think $15 billion to go build battery batteries for Europe and for the rest of the world, ex-China. And, you know, that’s an example of a company where they had a really grand ambition and it didn’t succeed. That being said, if we had five five different battery manufacturers
that were in the US and in Europe, this wouldn’t have had as much of an impact. So I think one of the ways is just de-risk is to have a portfolio. The other thing is, know, and this is where there is a responsibility that investors have, we just have to do our diligence, right? If it’s true that a company can do what they can do, ⁓ great, invest in them, back them, help and support them. But if it’s not true or if it’s fraudulent, then, you know, I think we have to be really careful and the responsibility is on us to just make sure
we’re doing our homework.
Last question?
Michael Ethan Gold (55:32)
Hi, I’m Johan, also ex-founder, turned investor, but from a non-technical background. I feel like there’s ⁓ a bit of a gap between technical and non-technical people, especially if we’re going to think of the founder journey and sort of like inherently so. So I technical and non-technical people, have different interests, they’re in different social circles and, you know, just being at different places. ⁓ Do you think that’s an issue
to be thought about and what do you think can be done about this as a way to like foster more innovation and accelerate the speed that we’re solving the problem.
Anku Madan (56:11)
I think the more diversity of backgrounds around the table, it’s always better. Some technical investors aren’t always the best storytellers. Some great social scientists who are investors maybe aren’t the best at evaluating that early stage technology risk. When we think about making new investments, we look at the investors that are around the table, we say, okay, are they really heavily technical? Are they really heavily business model oriented? If we don’t have the right people, we go find them.
We find it to be really important, in the case of geothermal, for example, when this company is going after large power purchase agreements with big customers, we want people around the table that know the energy markets. We want people that really understand how to sell to utilities. ⁓ It is not only about the technology and it’s not only about the business model. It generally tends to be just the more diversity around the table, the better it is. All right.
Michael Ethan Gold (57:08)
Well, thank you, Anku. Please join me in thanking Anku one more time.