Sophie Purdom: Climate Tech Investing, Brown Spinning, Venture, Sustainability, newsletters, investment philosophy, life advice

Ben Yeoh Chats

Sophie Purdom co-writes a climate and innovation newsletter read by tens of thousands, ClimateTech VC. Sophie has worked in start ups as an operator. She is a venture capitalist investor. She has written widely on sustainable investing.

We speak on how Sophie came to climate tech investing, the importance of knocking on doors and being helpful.

What Sophie learned working for local government (Providence) and how climate has always been her through line into investing.

We discuss what areas of climate tech are over-invested in and under-invested in, and why she’s interested in the climate-industrial-tech area.

We chat about investment philosophy, the VC geography and gender lens and how she seeds the landscape on access to capital at the seed and pre-seed stage.

Sophie explains the concept of “brown spinning” and the pros/cons of taking assets private or selling brown assets to less responsible entities.

“This concept is what we would call brown spinning. So taking publicly held brown or underperforming - from a climate perspective - assets private in order to hypothetically avoid rigorous accounting and operate with capital providers that are less ESG inclined. Fascinating topic. One of the many downsides to divestment: if there's a will then money will often find a way to finance these things.One positive example in the case of reversing brown spinning s is AGL in Australia. One of the largest energy giants out there and billionaire, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes playing the activist investor role as an individual, coming in and buying up more and more percentage ownership in this business in an effort to strongly nudge activists, push them towards greener practices and he succeeded in getting that board vote and changing the outcomes of that business. So that's one very rare splashed all over the front page of the media example of how there's a way of green spinning these private brown assets potentially back to good. But to be fair, the majority of the stories that should be told unfortunately go in the other direction.One that caught my eye …Another billionaire, Harold Hamm is trying to take the shale (gas) Company that he founded - Continental Resources - private. He owns (already) about 83% of this oil and gas US based company. The idea is take the company private because the public market investors are skeptical of plowing money into a non-ESG aligned (strategy). He thinks he can get a better return or cheaper capital in the private market - the quintessential brown spinning concept. I'm concerned about it. I'm not exactly sure what you do here other than you can't go too hard or too fast on ESG reporting requirements without bringing folks along on the management train and leave them out because the worst case scenario is they hop off of the reporting requirements and go operate in the dark.”

We play over-rated, under-rated on: Lifting Weights, Carbon tax, Green New Deal, Tesla

Carbon offsets, Nuclear Power, Carbon removal and the woolly mammoth.

We finish on Sophie’s current projects and her career and life advice.

Transcript and video available here.