MCJ Collective Q1 2022 LP Report, and more

By the MCJ Collective team

Apr 17, 2022

Our three pillars at MCJ Collective are content, community, and capital. On the capital front, we’ve been fortunate to raise two venture capital funds over the last year and a half that have collectively invested in ~60 incredibly promising climate tech startups. (As always, the publicly announced investments we have made are viewable on our portfolio page.)

Each quarter, we prepare a report for the Limited Partners in our venture funds. Limited Partners are the investors who have invested in our funds and allow us to have capital to invest in climate tech startups. Most venture capital funds have a Limited Partner base that is made up primarily of institutional investors — pension funds and other professional capital allocators. To date, the MCJ Limited Partner base across our venture funds is made up of nearly 300 individual investors — and almost every single one is an individual human who is backing our funds in part because they want to roll up their sleeves and help the companies we back. We view this as a unique part of our differentiation…it’s one of many ways that the community around MCJ is helping to support climate innovation.

Quarterly “LP Reports” are typically quite confidential, but at MCJ we have made the decision to begin sharing as much as possible with the broader MCJ community. So earlier this week we published a public version of our LP report and posted it on our website. We believe that we have a broader accountability, not just to our partners but to the MCJ community and the climate community at large. While we can’t share everything — most company-specific data from our portfolio companies is their confidential information and not something that we have permission to broadly disseminate — we have tried to be as inclusive as possible with what we’ve chosen to publish. This report in particular includes our first detailed attempt at reviewing how the MCJ portfolio is doing from a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) perspective.

We welcome your feedback on the report including ideas for how we can improve it in the future. You can download it from our website here.

Weekly climate art! This week, we’re featuring Nicole Kelner, check her out on Twitter.

📢 Climate Action of the Week

Want to do more? Sign up for the next Climate Changemakers Hour of Action.

This week had some frustrating news from the US Federal government when it comes to climate progress. The US has indicated that it will resume oil and gas drilling on Federal land despite prior Biden campaign promises to the contrary. This hardens our resolve even further on the need to push the Senate to pass the $555 Billion in climate funding that the House passed last year. As part of our MCJ Action series with Adam McKay on April 6, McKay committed to “calling a Senator or Representative, news outlet or corporation every day for 30 straight days” and invited us all to join him in doing the same. He’s since been reporting on his progress on Twitter (follow him at @ghostpanther) with the hashtags #30DaysofClimate and #30DayChallenge, and we encourage everyone reading this to please do the same. Climate Changemakers has made a helpful guide to calling your Senators here.

🍿 The Leanback

Learn about Nth Cycle this week with Pique Action’s mini-documentaries.

🔎 Fresh Takes

Each week, The Regenerates will surface a climate campaign or stories to be told—elevating why it works (or doesn't) from a communications and marketing lens.

What do pillow-forts, sand castles, and better futures have in common? We’re wondering what kind of climate progress might be possible — and what other possibilities we might unlock — if we give ourselves permission to let our child-like imaginations run wild. Read more

🎙 Startup Series

Jason caught up with Harry Hamlin, actor, author, entrepreneur, and Founder/Secretary of TAE Technologies. You may remember Harry from such 1980s hits as the movie Clash of the Titans and the TV show LA Law, but until we sat down with Harry we didn’t fully appreciate how long he’s been deep in climate tech. The company he founded, TAE Technologies, has been pursuing breakthroughs in nuclear fusion for many years and it’s well worth a listen to hear how Harry went from actor to climate tech entrepreneur and what TAE Technologies is doing to advance our pursuits of truly clean energy.

✨ Highlights

🤝 MCJ is hiring! We’re looking for a Content and Social Media Lead to focus on all things MCJ Podcast and newsletter! Check out the job description here.

🗞 Community News ICYMI our friends at Stripe, Shopify, Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey teamed up and launched a $925MM climate removal buying program they are calling Frontier.

👋 MCJ Meetups This past week we held an MCJ Meetup event in San Francisco. As various parts of the world have inched their way back to normalcy, we’re seeing in person meetups pick up again. In the past few months, the NYC, Southern California and London communities have met up and planning is underway for meetups in Seattle and other spots, too. If you want to host a local meetup, please reach out to yin@mcjcollective.com for support! Thanks to Steven Zhang, Alec Turnbull, Leone Baron, and Charlotte Mallo for hosting the meetups across SF, NYC and London, Los Angeles, respectively.

👩‍💻 Climate Jobs

For more open positions, check out the #j-climatejobs channel in MCJ Slack.

Artyc is seeking a Staff Mechanical and Thermal Engineer to help them reimagine the cold chain of logistics
Terra.do is seeking a Business Development Manager, a Marketing Manager, and other positions
Yard Stick is seeking a Principal Soil Scientist
Charge Robotics is seeing a Senior Mechanical Engineer
Sequestr is seeking a Senior Carbon Offset Coordinator
Raptor Maps is seeking a Communications and Publicity Specialist among other roles
WattBuy is seeking a Director of Business Development
Mellazyme is seeking a Full Stack Developer among many other roles posted in the MCJ Slack

👉 Events

For more climate events, check out the #c-events channel in MCJ Slack.

“How to Get a Job in Climate” (Virtual, Tuesday, April 26th, 12PM EST)
“The Future of Grid Energy Storage” (San Francisco, CA, Thursday, May 12th, 6PM EST)

Climate Voices is a free weekly email curating news, jobs, MCJ episodes, and other noteworthy happenings in the MCJ community.

💭If you have feedback or items you’d like to include, feel free to reach out.

🌳If you’d like to become an MCJ member, apply today!

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