This Week in MCJ (4/10/21)
Hi all,
We got the quarterly survey results back this week, and the results were quite interesting. The good news is people are generally happy being members of MCJ, and getting a lot of value from it. But there are definitely some areas for improvement/development.
I’ll try to summarize some of the key findings here:
We may be putting out too much content for members to keep up with, even if you want to.
The community can be hard to navigate for some new people coming in.
While members do value the content, community events and career resources are both higher on your wish list, in terms of areas for us to expand.
Some members wish we had more of a global focus, vs so US centric.
There were also a few questions about our investment fund, and whether it is a distraction from our core or compromises our objectivity with our content.
On the putting out too much content front, that was actually a bit of a relief to hear, as our small team has been struggling to keep up with the pace, making it hard to find the time for other important initiatives. In the short term, we are going to slow down a bit. We will absolutely keep the content machine going, and may pick up the pace again in the future, but this will allow us to pour the energy we free up into making important improvements to the community, and should also allow us to make the content we do put out there higher quality!
On the community front, we’re going to try to double down on making the community easier to use, and more valuable to you all. We have some exciting new things in motion, like Office Hours, but expect more from us in this area, for sure.
On the global focus, we absolutely agree, and long-term we definitely plan to get there. May not get too far this quarter, just from a resourcing and priorities standpoint, but it is very much on our list to tackle over time.
And on the fund, we firmly believe that our three pillars (content, community, & capital), are each essential and create a powerful long-term flywheel across the things that we do. We also pride ourselves on treating every guest the same, whether they are from a company we have backed or not - we ask tough questions to everybody. One thing we can make sure to do going forward is, if a guest is from a company we have funded, we will make sure to disclose it. We should note though that sometimes a guest comes on the show and we get introduced to the company, but don’t make the decision to back them until later.
The MCJ community is diverse and awesome, and the spirt in the community is fierce and energizing. We know you are all putting a lot of trust in us to be responsible shepherds of this community, and it is a responsibility that we don’t take lightly. We will do everything in our power to maintain that trust, and please keep us honest if you ever feel otherwise!
As always, thanks for your support. We are honored to be on this journey with you. Onwards!
Jason
🎙Episodes
🌍This week's episodes included an in-depth policy conversation with Erin Burns, Executive Director of Carbon180. As Executive Director, Erin works with scientists, entrepreneurs, academics, and policymakers to create and inform federal policy on carbon capture, removal, and use.
⛅I was joined by Lyndall Schreiner on our Climate Careers series. Lyndall made the transition into climate in 2019 taking a job as the Director of Product at Afresh and also opened the Earthrise School to help coach others to land jobs in the climate space.
✈And on Wednesday night, I had a lively discussion with a great group from across the aviation industry about the future of clean air travel. Guests included Robin Riedel, Partner at McKinsey, Rohini Sengupta, Sustainability & Climate Lead at United Airlines, Val Miftakhov, Founder & CEO of ZeroAvia, Jason Chua, Co-founder & COO of Universal Hydrogen, and Fay Collier, Associate Director for Flight Strategy at NASA.
✨Highlights
🤳Next Week’s MCJ Live will be a conversation with Gene Berdichevsky, CEO & Co-Founder of Sila Nanotechnologies Inc. Jason and Gene will have a fireside chat and take questions from the audience. You can find the event here.
📰Climate News this week! Rocky Mountain Institute debuted Canary Media, an independent newsroom at the forefront of the clean energy transition. Canary Media will be powered by former Greentech Media staff and David Roberts. The Nature Conservancy is under fire over the sale of millions of dollars in meaningless carbon credits to corporations like JP Morgan, BlackRock, and Disney. As a result, The Nature Conservancy is conducting an internal review into their offset projects. A giant pool of industrial waste almost burst in Florida this week. There are thousands of these waste pools around the country threatening communities according to The New York Times. This is not only a public health crisis but also a climate concern.
💼Climate Jobs
Jobs, fellowships, and career opportunities shared by members of the MCJ community. More opportunities can be found in #climatejobs in the MCJ Slack.
Senior Full-stack Engineer at Planet FWD (job listing) (careers page)
Marketing Associate at BlocPower (NYC-preferred) (job listing) (careers page)
Head of Product at Mr. Fusion (job listing)
Chemist/Chemical Engineer ideally someone with some aerogel/sol-gel experience, either industry or just a PhD in a relevant field and a great attitude at Thermulon (London) (job listing) (careers page)
📚Startup Resources
The Urban Future Prize Competition showcases and awards the world’s most revolutionary cleantech innovations by bringing the brightest entrepreneurs together to compete for three prizes - Future Environments, Future Vision, and Future Impact. Prize finalists will be featured at the Urban Future Summit, which hosts an audience of mission-driven investors, policy leaders, and corporate sponsors! climate tech startups and climate justice organizations can apply by May 3 to win $150k across 3 prizes.
👋 Welcome New MCJers!
You can learn more about new members on #introductions, where you can welcome them to the community.
Jonny Everett: Jonny is currently working to help scientists build climate tech companies via buildaclimatestartup.com. Excited to learn from the community and help where he can.
Irena Spazzapan: Irena leads the investment side of SYSTEMIQ. She looks forward to meeting MCJ members and sharing interesting content.
Michael Dennis: An early stage investor in cleantech with a government-backed VC fund in Nova Scotia. Michael is excited to connect with start-ups that can help to decarbonize the global economy.
John Beckett: John is a tech and sustainability entrepreneur who is looking to apply his experience in scaling software businesses to a climate-tech start-up.
Hannah Murdoch: Hannah is an investor @ Union Square Ventures working on thesis development and diligence for USV’s Climate Fund. Excited to be part of MCJ.
James Booth: Ex-Biden Paid Media Analytics Director. Looking to make concrete climate change impact in the next chapter by selling plant-based protein.
Ben Wunderman: Ben is currently the Director of SMB Competitive Intelligence at RingCentral. Interested in EVs, ecological restoration, DAC, policy and climate action.
Ophelia Scai: Ophelia leads climate/sustainability/blockchain investments at LocalGlobe. Interested in carbon capture and storage technologies, food waste, supply chains and sake making.
Alex Brussell: Alex is an investor at Forerunner Ventures, he joined MCJ to meet other founders, investors, researchers, and activists who care about addressing the climate crisis.
Allen Downey: Allen is a professor of computer science at Olin College, near Boston. If you are working on climate change and you need a data scientist / software engineer, let's talk.
Chris Micali: Chris is co-founder and vp product at Sense. He is excited to be part of the MCJ community.
Mike Ames: a physician (a UCSF-trained internal medicine hospitalist) hoping to make a career switch to climate change, he is really interested in engineered biologic systems for carbon removal.
Randy Altschuler: Randy co-founded Mr. Fusion. He looks forward to getting to know MCJers and help tackle the problem of climate change.
Joseph Quigley: Joseph co-founded Mr. Fusion. He is a mechanical engineer, listener of the MCJ podcast, runner, and waste and energy enthusiast.
Alex Foucault: Alex supports early stage startups at Urban Future Lab in Brooklyn. He hopes to be able to find new ways and opportunities to apply my skills to the climate challenge.
Annalee Tai: Annalee is a senior Geoscience major at Williams College. She is hoping to use her data skillset (geospatial, modeling) to tackle climate issues and build resilience.
Lola Fernandez Flores: Lola worked for a VC based out of Dubai investing in early-stage startups across the world , she is focused specifically on ClimateTech, Food&Ag and Fintech.
📌Community Board
News and initiatives from members of our community. MCJers mentioned can be DMed in Slack.
👨🏫MCJ Office Hours needs May mentors! If you’re interested in serving as a May mentor please reach out to Sarah Adams via Slack DM or email.
⚖The MCJ DEI & Climate Justice community group is looking for experts in the space who can share their experiences on a community call. If you have experiences getting DEI work going at your organisations or in the climate justice space, then please DM or email Sarah Adams. She can introduce you to the community leaders of the group.
🎟Climate Events
Check out the MCJ Calendar! Stay up to date with all things MCJ. We encourage members to host community events such as expert Q&As, book clubs, topic discussions, location-based meet-ups, and more! If you want to add your event to the calendar, email us at events@myclimatejourney.co with the details. For third-party events, please use the #events channel in the MCJ slack!
Upcoming
MCJ (New and Existing) Member Orientation (Friday, April 16th @ 5 pm ET)
Thai is piloting a new weekly event to help onboard recently joined and existing members to the community. Attendees can expect a casual conversation about how to navigate the community, opportunities to engage in various events, programs and groups and anything else folks would like to discuss. Since it’s on a Friday, we can also treat it as a virtual happy hour with fellow members. To learn more, join the #orientation Slack channel or DM Thai.
MCJ Live on Clubhouse (Wednesday, April 14th @ 9 pm ET)
This week, Jason will have a one on one discussion with Gene Berdichevsky, CEO & Co-Founder of Sila Nanotechnologies Inc. If you’re on Clubhouse, follow the ‘MCJ Live’ club and you can find the event here. iPhones users not yet on Clubhouse can sign-up with the link in the #MCJ-Live Slack channel.
The Techstars Sustainability Summit (Thursday, April 15th)
An opportunity for TechStars’ network and the wider climate and sustainability ecosystem to come together, share learnings, and further the collaboration needed to scale solutions. Meet founders focused on sustainable technology and hear from leaders about realizing opportunities to rebuild cleaner, more resilient industries and infrastructure. Please RSVP here, and feel free to pass along to your colleagues and networks!
SoCal Socially Distanced Hike (Saturday, April 17th @ 4 pm PT)
We're hiking the Paseo Miramar Trail with the SoCal MCJ members. We will wear masks and social distance for this 2-hour hike. Contact Charlotte Mallo or join the So-Cal slack channel for more info and updates on SoCal events.
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