Building in Public for Climate Tech Ventures:
a conversation with Emma Mee
Twitter
LinkedIn
From Day 1 on the Carbon13 Venture Builder, we tell founders to get their ideas in front of as many people as possible. Some founders take this a step further and use the “building in public” approach, sharing the business-building journey with insights into the behind-the-scenes of a founder’s life. In innovative sectors, where community and idea-proofing are key, this is especially important. This is why Emma Mee, with her 20 years’ experience in sustainability, has taken a few moments to reflect on the importance of building in public for climate tech ventures and how Carbon13’s Venture Builder Programmes help founders on this journey.
What benefits are there to ‘building a climate tech startup in public’?
“Getting a new product or service to market is hard, and speed is of particular essence in most cases. Building fast, responding to trends, and producing solutions to urgent problems like climate change, means founders need to keep their ‘pedal to the metal’ throughout the whole process, from market validation and customer discovery, to getting their first prototype or MVP into the hands of customers.”
We find the climate-tech community to be particularly open and encouraging, where people’s passion for solutions and humble acknowledgments on their own limitations of involvement creates a safe and conducive space for ideas to be fleshed out.
Building in public is the most efficient and time effective way to get feedback from critical friends, and early-stage conversations starting around the potential opportunities for sales or partnerships. Sure, understanding how to balance building in public with the need to protect your venture’s IP is important, but usually this can be managed through only engaging with trusted communities and a little common sense. We find the climate-tech community to be particularly open and encouraging, where people’s passion for solutions and humble acknowledgments on their own limitations of involvement creates a safe and conducive space for ideas to be fleshed out. Along with speed, diversity of thought is also key for innovation.
Gone are the days when a product is built is built through small cliques of Silicon Valley friends in garages, fuelled by Red Bull and the false optimism that groupthink creates – diverse teams are proving they have greater strength and resilience, and those that engage diverse members of their advisory boards or brains trust can also create better solutions that suit more people. Only the openness and transparency of building in public can engage people from different sectors, experience, demographics and geographies to support a genuine innovation.
What can founders take away from our Venture Builder’s CIDs about building in public?
Programmes like Carbon13 attract a lot of support from the climate tech community and enjoy lively and rich conversations with our network. Founders on the programme start the process individually, joining 80 or so other participants on day one, and are quick to experience the diversity and strength in their community of committed and passionate founders. However, once they have established their team and started to establish their start-up’s focus, they spend the second phase of the Venture Builder really deep diving into their market and customers.
Towards the end of this process, they need to ‘look up’ and along with pitching their business proposition to Carbon13 for investment, the community input day is an opportunity to sense check their ideas and make a committed pledge to the world about the direction that they are heading in. The interest in their work should be encouragement enough – we had over 500 people register to watch their pitches online, and each and every one has been flooded with questions, introductions and messages of support. It’s important for any founder to take a little time out and realise how far they have come – our ventures didn’t exist 3 months ago – and to engage a support network to get them through some of the tougher times ahead.
How does Carbon13 help them do this?
People can be passionate about setting up a climate tech venture at any stage of their career and in any location. But the journey is hard, and you need to act quickly and determinedly to establish credibility and scale in what is such an exciting but difficult space. Carbon13 recognises no one has to try and do it alone – a strong founding team can move quicker, achieve more, and gain better traction and investment. By creating the stage for these teams to meet, establishing a strong and viable business with support and vital connections, more and more teams can launch stronger and faster – precisely what we need to make an impact on climate change now.