Welcome to Carbon13’s podcast “Climate Takes” where we ask founders, investors and builders for their “takes” on their industry and climate challenge, as well as setting a call to action, asking what will it take to solve the climate emergency?
On Climate Takes Venture Builders, we’re looking at the core model of Carbon13 itself. We’re joined by two entrepreneurs who work within Carbon13, Puja Balachander and Nishul Saperia. Using their Founding and Venture Building experience, we deep dive into how venture builders work, how they accelerate startups, and therefore why we chose this model to fight the climate emergency.
“As a founder you’re going to wake up and eat problems for breakfast”
About the episode
Carbon13’s founding mission was to accelerate the UK’s climatetech ecosystem by supporting and investing in entrepreneurs to build scalable companies with global impacts on emissions.
And we chose to use the Venture Builder model to do this.
Since 2021 over 1000 entrepreneurs have passed through a Carbon13 programme and during that time, Puja Balachander and Nishual Saperia have worked with the bulk of our entrepreneurs, deploying their serial entrepreneur backgrounds to support our teams through the challenges of launching a startup, and refining our Venture Builder along the way.
In Climate Takes Venture Builders, they discuss:
- How Venture Builders differ to accelerators et al
- Why investors choose to invest in Venture Builders directly, and in the startups that launch out of them
- How Venture Builders can help founders solve the hardest challenge of all: finding a great committed cofounder
- Their own experiences successfully founding startups, or failing with success
- Differences between supporting software startups and hardtech/science led ventures.
"There are key advantages, just the number of runs on goal"
Puja Balachander, Director of Venture at Carbon13
Also on Climate Takes
We ask special guests for their “takes” on their industry and climate challenge, as well as setting a call to action, asking what will it take to solve the climate emergency?