This Week in MCJ (5/22/21)
The momentum is palpable!
Hey everyone,
The most exciting MCJ-specific news for me this week was the MCJ in-person meetups are starting to pop up again, which were just starting to pick up before the pandemic. Maybe there is light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, after all! Let’s keep this momentum going!
I’m also pretty excited (ok fine, MORE excited!) about the F-150 Lightning announcement. If we want to bring about the wholesale change we need, it isn’t just going to come from mobilizing people who are climate concerned, we need to build better trucks for truck lovers that just happen to be better for the planet! And repeat that product by product, and sector by sector.
I’d also like to give a shout-out to Tim Latimer and the Fervo team, for just crushing it with this Google partnership! 👊 (we are not investors in Fervo, to be clear - just huge fans!)
Here’s another thing on my mind, network effects, and building a network that gets more valuable for each participant as new participants join. That tweet was about our climate tech investment portfolio, but we are absolutely thinking about this for MCJ membership, as well. I would say we’ve been doing this accidentally already, but plan to get a lot more explicit about it across everything we do at MCJ.
And finally, the internal MCJ team is planning our first team offsite! Kind of crazy, in that, out of the 7 of us, I have never met anyone in person besides Thai! We are pumped to be gathering to start mapping out and aligning around a plan to think bigger and move faster.
Have a great week, everyone! The decarbonization/energy transition drum beat is getting louder every day.
Jason & Team MCJ
🎙Episodes
This week's episodes included a lively discussion with Jimmy Samartzis, CEO of LanzaJet. LanzaJet accelerates the global energy transition by using its leading technology to make safe, sustainable aviation fuels and diesel fuels from waste. I also caught up with Shashank Samala and Noah McQueen at Heirloom. The company focuses on leveraging carbon mineralization as a climate solution with the hope of removing a billion tons of carbon from the air by 2035.
✨Highlights
Climate News this week! President Biden signed an executive order Thursday in the latest acknowledgement of how climate change, once dismissed as a distant threat, is already complicating life for Americans. The world's largest iceberg has calved from Antarctica over the past few days, a giant floating piece of ice close to 80 times the size of Manhattan. The iceberg broke off the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica's Weddell Sea, the European Space Agency (ESA) said Wednesday.
MCJers in NYC met up on Wednesday! If you’re in the NY area, check out the #nyc channel for the next gathering.
💼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. Check out this google doc!
📚Startup Resources
Resources, accelerators, and grants for startups and individuals.
The GS Beyond Energy Innovation Challenge celebrates purpose-driven startups that address persistent and emerging energy transition problems. The winner of the challenge will receive a $100,000 cash prize. More info here!
👋 Welcome New MCJers!
You can learn more about new members on #introductions, where you can welcome them to the community. Don’t forget to check out the Member Directory, you can learn more about fellow members and find people to connect with.
Amanda Pelle: Looking to transition from raising her kids to focusing time and energy in climate solutions. Here to learn, volunteer, connect and eventually find meaningful work.
Kelsi Flatland: Kelsi is a software engineer (and former astronomer and educator) excited to learn, grow, and explore climate career paths with MCJ folks.
Brian Ballan: Brian sold a food company. Now he’s working with startups at the intersection of food/ag/climate to decarbonize and descale the food system.
Tom Ferguson: Tom started in climate 2008 & chose water in 2015. 6 yrs w/ IH2O Accelerator, now founded BIV (water seed fund). Here to help MCJ crew on water.
Jeff Domenick: An experienced leader of tech solutions teams, Jeff is ex-adtech and eager to help build a high-powered, sustainable economy. Here to learn.
Rabo Garba: Nigerian born, now in Brooklyn. Energy engineering now management consulting. Interested in the intersection of technology, infrastructure, and finance and a just energy transition.
Josh Gilbert: A climate entrepreneur at Sust, using geospatial data to provide climate risk insights. Sust is hiring technical and commercial roles, he’d love to connect with applicants.
Katherine Woolford: Katherine is a fellow at an SF venture philanthropy. By day she takes joy in supporting climate entrepreneurs grow their orgs and impact, and by night loves all things mangroves and seagrasses.
Jonathan Strimling: CleanFiber makes high-performance insulation from recycled cardboard. As CEO, he is a serial entrepreneur seeking fellow Cleantech nerds.
Allison Canton: Allison was an Associate General Counsel at Flatiron Health, she is new to the climate space and excited to meet the MCJ community.
Cass Mao: An Aussie ex-VC looking at research commercialization for climate, Cass previously was a Venture Partner at Tenacious Ventures.
Abigail Tisch: An investor at RRE Ventures in New York, a seed and A stage firm, where we're working on building out a climate thesis. She Would love to connect with other investors, founders, and researchers.
Shane Reiser: A general partner at Futureproof, Shane is doing his best to live sustainably, from his diet to his purchases to his habits.
Jenan Wise: A Los Angeles-based product-focused software engineer/manager, most recently at Stripe.
Julia Reichelstein: Currently a VC investing in climate tech with Piva Capital. Particularly interested in the intersection of climate and international development work.
Guillaume Aman: A soon to graduate Harvard MBA, exploring opportunities in product management and strategy/business development.
Holly Gordon: With experience in policy and sustainability, Holly is looking for her next job. She was the first VP of Policy at Sunrun and built & led the Sustainability team at BART.
Jay Bodenhausen: Experienced solutions engineer who is intent on driving solutions to our biggest issue. He is excited to be part of MCJ.
📌Community Board
News and initiatives from members of our community. MCJers mentioned can be DMed in Slack.
📚Vote for the next book in the MCJ book club! Check out Nitin’s post here and vote for the next book here!
👋This week Slack announced users will have the option to add their pronouns to their profiles. We’ve enabled this profile feature and we encourage members to update their profiles accordingly.
🦘Mick Liubinskas created the #climatetech channel for anyone looking to share and collaborate around technology solutions for climate challenges.
🏃Join a three-week Climate Sprint, where you and a team of 3-4 other people will dive deep into a specific climate topic and meet regularly while brainstorming as a team, conducting interviews, and doing research. Sprints for this upcoming round begin on May 24th, with topics ranging from carbon removal to regenerative grazing to urban heat islands to residential heat pumps.
👩🏫MCJ June Office Hours! Looking for June mentors to host Office Hours. "mentors" can be a daunting word but we think of mentors as anyone who has skills that could be valuable to other members! If you are interested in participating as a mentor please reach out to Sarah Adams via Slack DM or email.
🎟Climate Events
Check out the MCJ Calendar! 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 the details at events@myclimatejourney.co. For third-party events, please use the #events channel in the MCJ slack!
Upcoming
Stripe Climate Demo Day (Wednesday, May 26th @ 9 am PT)
After an extensive review process, Stripe made their next round of carbon removal purchases. Learn more about the companies at this free event. Request an invite here!Women-in-Climate Meet up (Wednesday, May 26th @ 10 am MT)
This is meant to be a safe space for women to discuss, collaborate, celebrate, share knowledge about their climate journey and support each other. The meet-up follows a Lean Coffee format and always gets through a variety of topics. Email Hannah Davis for a calendar invite.
Icebreaker: Meet an MCJer (Thursday, May 27th @ 10:30 am PT)
European/African friendly time! Meet MCJers through several 10-min 1:1 casual conversations with a fellow community member, facilitated by the video chat platform Gatheround. RSVP here!
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