“People see a problem and see that no one is fixing it, so they decide, I will do it.”
This was the answer our three engineer-founders gave to Puja, our panel host and Head of Carbon13’s Venture Launchpad, when she asked why they had decided to pursue entrepreneurship. As it turns out, all three had made the same decision for the same reason.
Luca left a role at Rolls Royce, Osas left a role in academia, and Maria left a role as a hydropower consultant. They all left because they could see a problem that no one else was fixing. And they’re not talking about small problems within an industrial process, they’re talking about a world-wide problem affecting the planet’s health. The world is struggling to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, good enough is just not good enough. These three decided to do something about it.
So, how did they re-skill as founders, how did they get their ideas off the ground, how did they align their vision with a commercial strategy, and how did they tackle the thorny problem of raising money for a complex engineering product that doesn’t actually exist yet?
That’s what we were there to find out. That’s why we’d all battled the winter rain to come to the Institution for Mechanical Engineers in Westminster.
And for those who couldn’t be there on the night, here’s all the questions and tips from our panel: from how to know if your idea is good enough, to raising investment for a climatetech venture:
Firstly, how does an engineer approach entrepreneurship?
How does an engineer approach entrepreneurship to start with? Well, our founders framed their answer as “a problem needs a solution”. Maria knew from her knowledge of the hydro industry that no one was quantifying emissions from water, yet this should be a core component in calculations for industry and governments.
Luca was looking at the problem of recycling composite plastics and fibreglass, a core component in wind turbines. Yet the end-of-life plan for their blades is still to just throw them in a landfill.
Osas realised the central role that foundation industries will play in building infrastructure in Nigeria and West Africa. Most of the buildings that will be standing in 2050 are being built now. This led him to do his PhD in Steel, giving him the insights on the need for the industry to capitalise on data to optimise its production and reduce its emissions.
How do you know you’re ready to become a climate tech founder?
It’s one thing to spot a problem, it’s another to know when you’re ready to start. Our panel had two main pieces of advice. Number 1: read books. Osas advocated The Mom Test (and I 100% agree) and From Zero to IPO. “By reading books you live someone else’s life,” Osas said, “Read it. Roes it inspire you? Then you could become an entrepreneur”. Luca agreed that reading these books “stops a panic at 9pm”.
Number 2, best articulated by Maria: “Surround yourself with like-minded people.” Maria explained that she left Spain because she didn’t find the entrepreneurial ecosystem that she needed, she found it in London. “People understand you when you say what you do.” Being surrounded by people working on climate entrepreneurship normalises it and helps everyone move forward together.
Another common thread between the panel though was that quite simply, they wanted more from their careers than just a straight engineering focus. They wanted a bigger horizon than just the deadline for the next project. Maria had volunteered for nearly a decade with Engineers Without Borders for example, looking to apply her skills to mission-focused projects.
“Getting involved in an ecosystem, so many good things happen, you get friends, entrepreneurs like you, everyone sharing tricks of the trade”
How do you know if your idea is a good idea for a startup?
Our panel emphasised the difference between a vision for a solution to a problem, and the work founders need to do to turn it into a business. Luca said “the problem is not the same as what the customer wants to pay for. I really had to revisit the problem from a customer point of view.” This led him and his cofounder Rick to start focusing initially on an opportunity in fibreglass for boat hulls, even if the long term vision is much wider than that.
And this means that “an idea” rarely stays the same throughout a startup’s life. It’s merely a starting hypothesis. Maria shared the story of Open Hydro’s evolution from the starting point she and her first cofounder established, to its mission today built with their third cofounder Anna.
So, at the beginning, you just need your idea to be enough to get started with, you don’t need to have all the answers. Its evolution through customer discovery that will be your next step.
How should you get started?
Our panel all agreed that the strongest starting point is the ecosystem you build your startup in.
“You need to surround yourself with the right people, you need to join an ecosystem.” said Maria, building on her earlier point about surrounding yourself with like-minded people.
Osas agreed “Getting involved in an ecosystem, so many good things happen, you get friends, entrepreneurs like you, everyone sharing tricks of the trade”. (And for Osas, good things happening led to his funding round for Deep.Meta – but we’ll dive into that later.)
And it’s more than choosing an ecosystem, it’s about your team. You’re never building your company alone. In fact at Carbon13, the first Phase of the Venture Builder is focused on supporting individuals to build cofounding teams, and in the Venture Launchpad, we only invest in teams. Why? Because at pre-seed stage, investors are investing as much in your team as in your idea. They are judging if they think your team has the skills, experience and resilience to carry out your goals. What’s more, they know your idea will change, that you’ll encounter unexpected problems, but with a strong team, you can adapt to any challenge.
So when getting started, you want to focus as much on finding a cofounder who complements your skillset and who is as committed as you are, as you do on the technology you want to build.
Both Maria and Luca found their complementary cofounders through Carbon13, engineer Luca shared his experience finding his CEO Rick, “Carbon13 was helpful, we were doing cofounder speed dating, I sat down with Rick, within a couple of minutes we were like, you’re the one for me!”
What does the day job look like?
This is a bigger question than it sounds. I could see our entrepreneurs mentally scrolling through their endless to-do lists as they tried to answer this! A large part is raising money, which we talk about next, but management of people is also a big part. Osas now manages a team of around eight people and juggles his time between running the company, and using his technical knowledge to support the team and get things done.
Maria said that it’s a lot of changing gears, but that was why people choose to be entrepreneurs. They want a varied day job with lots of different challenges. People like her don’t want to do the same projects in the same field year in year out.
Then the panel flipped the question to more about how they allocate their time and energy. Osas finds energy from hitting milestones, and absolutely hates time wasting. His tip was to only set one target a day to achieve, as that way you’ll achieve 30 things in a month.
Luca’s point was that our brains are wired to seek small rewards quickly, not rewards coming five years down the line. So, like Osas, he tries to get small rewards each week.
For Maria, it was teamwork which gives her energy and she spoke about how important it was to work with cofounders as whole people, not just as task-doers. The quality time she spends with her cofounders is as important as the focused time on tasks. It’s this which builds a healthy team.
How do you fund your climate tech startup as an engineer?
And finally, the money. How do you fund an engineering-based climate startup?
I’ll share a daunting number from Luca’s story to start with. He and Rick have contacted 700 Venture Capital firms (known as VCs). That’s resulted in at least 150 conversations. It’s a lot of work, but necessary because there’s a huge gap between proving technology in a lab, and getting a factory plant built to roll it out to customers. Unlike iterative software and apps, engineering solutions can be all or nothing.
However Luca’s journey started with Phoenix Carbon raising pre-seed through Carbon13’s Venture Builder, (£120k) as did Maria and her venture Open Hydro. There the cofounding team have focused on grant funding and they’ve recently won a prestigious grant from UK Research and Innovation, enabling them to hire another technical lead and accelerate their plans to launch their pilot in Q1 2023.
Osas reframed the question “how do you sell something when you have nothing to sell?” For early stage startups, it’s all about story telling: getting someone to buy into your vision by picturing how it fits them. He touched upon an important part of what Carbon13 does with founders, we even have a Storyteller-In-Residence, so we can help engineers-turned-founders turn their vision into a story attractive to investors and customers.
He also flagged that with climate, there are many organisations out there who have money to give to entrepreneurs who can prove their impact on climate – just like UKRI for Open Hydro. This type of money is often ideal for founders right at the start, it’s £20k which can support them for a year while they work full time on building the idea. He recommended getting a grant writer because usually their remuneration is heavily tied to whether you win the grant or not, so “they only take in people that they think will win”, so even persuading a top grant writer to work with you is a sign of success.
Osas himself has since raised half a million, and he brought the conversation back to ecosystems. He shared his story of how through the ecosystem he’d joined, he was able to get in the room with investors physically and metaphorically. The latter because he was able to get that credibility through the ecosystem vouching for him, and physically because he had a Sliding Doors moment where because he was already at the office, he was invited to pitch last minute and ended up winning his biggest investor.
Ecosystems just increase serendipity. They make your luck for you.
Exploring entrepreneurship for the climate?
If you’ve been inspired by our engineer-founders and want to explore the urgent climate problems that we need entrepreneurs to solve, reach out to us at Carbon13 (hello@carbonthirteen.com).
We run regular webinars tailored to founders from different disciplines, including software, engineering and biochemistry. Take a look at what’s coming up next: