Cohort 11 of Carbon13’s Venture Builder has started in Cambridge, and this group has a clear theme: serial founders. 57% of the people joining us have built a company before.
That matters in climate tech. The problems are big, the timelines are long and there is little room for repeating mistakes someone has already made once. Our new founders bring the experience and the scar tissue from previous ventures, and now they are pointing it at decarbonisation.
Cohort 11 in numbers
It is a group that has juggled payroll, product launches and school runs, sometimes in the same week. We think that shows.
Rowboats, not kayaks
In the first week, the cohort went out on the River Cam and learned to row. Some took to it faster than others. Nobody fell in, as far as we know.
The outing had a point. At Carbon13 we back rowboats, not kayaks. A team of two or three experienced founders usually gets further than one founder paddling alone, and the reasons are practical. Co-founders with different skills cover more ground, so each person can spend their energy on what they are actually good at. A co-founder also spots the weak points you have stopped seeing in your own idea, and says so.
Then there is stamina. Building a climate tech company is hard and often slow. When the water gets choppy, someone else picks up the oar and the boat keeps moving.
Look for the person who loves doing the things you hate.
That is the one piece of advice we give every founder when we match teams on the programme.
What comes next
The founders are back at the University of Cambridge for their next block of in-person days. On the agenda is a climate hackathon, their first real chance to put the team-building lessons to work on an actual climate problem.
Cohort 11 joins a portfolio that keeps growing. To date, Carbon13 has made 113 investments into pre-seed startups, with the potential to decarbonise 979 million tonnes of CO2e per year. If you are an angel investor with a green or responsible investment strategy and want to know how our SEIS funds work, get in touch with us.
Welcome, Cohort 11. We can’t wait to see what you build.