Lessons learned after 5 years of climate tech entrepreneurship

Having worked in the ClimateTech sector for a few years (and with no intention to stop) - I can definitely emphasize with the potential for burnout. It's really ease to start caring immensely about your work, which can be great - but also needs some sort of balance so that it doesn't hit too hard when it doesn't work out.

> Failure to pick problems that are relevant for both will result in increased decision making complexity at all levels of the organisation: do we optimise for impact (the environmental problem) or for revenue (the customer’s problem)?

I've been an climate tech entrepreneur for the past 7+ years, and the most reliable way I've found to accomplish the combo viable-business + climate-impact:

1. Get a job at a revenue generating climate-change-fighting company (solar, EVs, policy/regulatory consulting, etc.).

2. Keep your eyes open for pain points that your company (or especially you in your position) would pay money to solve.

3. Quit and start a company solving that pain point (or if you're not the founder-type, go work for a company trying to solve that pain point).

I suppose this kind of strategy would work in many other industries, but it's especially effective in climate tech, because:

(a) As OP mentions, the pain points are very hidden to the general public, so you really need to be actually working inside the industry to find and understand them (since energy often has very complex business models and regulatory constructs).

(b) By focusing on finding pain points for already climate-change-fighting companies and solving them, your impact goals are already built-in, since you're enabling more impact by default. So you don't have to worry as much about finding the magical combo of viable-business + impact.

(c) The climate-change-fighting sector is so young that many of the pain points are still major issues and don't have many viable solutions yet. In other more mature industries, many pain points already have established companies solving them, so there's less of green field for new companies.

Anyway, for people looking to fight climate change, by far the biggest thing you can do is join the industry and make a career out of it. There's so much ceiling here!

Any chance of mentioning a few of those issues from point 2 that lets someone skip point 1?

The core problem here is that emitting carbon doesn't cost the polluters much, so helping them or their customers to avoid it doesn't save them money. It's not a pain point, so the only motivation for them to do anything about it would be altruism/"Look How Green We Are!" CSR marketing. That's why the world desperately needs a carbon tax, so emission goes from being an externality (i.e. somebody else's problem) to being priced into the activities that emit. So the producers get a real incentive to change, and throw money at the problem, because it helps their bottom line to do so. So those that can easily change to less emitting techniques will do so. So those that can't will help fund research into tech that will. So there's a market for green tech like this. So consumers will favor less carbon-intensive products, not just if they are hippies, but simply because they value their wallets.

The only way to make a massive, global change like this up and down the supply chain is to give everyone involved - from producers to logistics to consumers - a direct economic incentive to do so. A carbon tax fits that bill, and allows the market to do what it does best.