🗒️ A note from Ryan, your host: I'm so happy to have put these 80 interviews out into the world, and have made new friends, connections, and gained tons of inspiration along the way. But duty calls at the moment as my volunteer work in Ukraine takes all my time and attention. So I'll call it a wrap for now and hope to be back with new episodes one day. I hope you've enjoyed listening to these episodes as much as I enjoyed making them! I'll leave you with the most downloaded episode of t...

This August and September, I’m stepping away from the mic to volunteer — but I’m not leaving your podcast feed empty. Instead, I’m revisiting fan favourites in a short Summer Classics series. In this last episode of the series, I'm reviving my chat with comedian Stuart Goldsmith where we: 🛹 Quote the Simpsons a couple times 🏟️ Clarify it's different to speak in front of and in a stadium 🪱 Mention Dune's sandworms This episode explains how to talk about climate change without alienating people...

This August and September, I’m stepping away from the mic to volunteer — but I’m not leaving your podcast feed empty. Instead, I’m revisiting fan favourites in a short Summer Classics series. The second of three episodes in the series is my interview with Jessica Burley of Planet A. I call it the "Investor Favourite" because I've heard from lots of VCs that it contains some of the best climatetech investing advice they've heard, like why: The science folks should have an investment decision v...

This August and September, I’m stepping away from the mic to volunteer — but I’m not leaving your podcast feed empty. Instead, I’m revisiting fan favourites in a short Summer Classics series. First up is Shannon Falconer, Founder & CEO of BioCraft Pet Nutrition (formerly Because, Animals). Two years on, they’ve made huge strides toward radically reshaping the pet food industry — and Shannon remains one of the most mission-driven founders I know. If you want good news about the future of p...

I'm going to be spending the summer on the road, delivering humanitarian aid across Ukraine. And needless to say, it's not the best setup for recording a podcast. So things will be quiet here until about October when I'll be back with new episodes, when I'm back settled in Kyiv and in relative peace. If you want to follow my adventures, be sure to follow me on LinkedIn. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you'll be notified when new episodes come out. Have a great summer...

Felix Krause is the Managing Partner at Vireo Ventures, a European VC fund betting that the future of energy is electric, distributed, and intelligently managed. Based in Berlin, Felix brings sector-specific clarity to the sprawling world of climate investing and makes a strong case for why electrons, not moonshots, will define the next great energy transition. In this episode we talked about: 🔋 Why electrification isn’t just inevitable—it’s the most capital-efficient climate solution o...

Ismaël Bawah is the SciTech Community Coordinator at the Good Food Institute Europe and the man behind the Alt Protein Project, a global student-powered initiative to transform universities into hubs for alternative protein innovation. Alongside him, we also heard from Lisa Neidhardt of Imperial College London and Jorge Guadalupe of Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais—two campus leaders putting alt proteins on the academic map. In this episode we talked about: 🌱 How the Alt Protein Pr...

Veronique Hördemann is Managing Partner and CFO at Future Energy Ventures, a climatetech VC firm investing in the software layer of the energy transition. From her base in Essen (with a side of Berlin), Veronique talked about going from corporate VC to a fully independent impact fund and why they’ve made a deliberate choice to stay clear of hardware. In this episode we talked about: 🏙️ How they segment their investments across “future energy”, “future cities”, and “future technology” &n...

Anastasia Pavlovic is the co-founder of Eion, a carbon removal company that accelerates Earth's natural rock weathering process to lock away CO₂—permanently. Eion works with farmers to deploy enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in agricultural fields, creating a carbon sink disguised as soil amendment, with benefits to landowners and climate alike. Anastasia joined the podcast from Detroit to talk about carbon, kids, and the importance of remembering to eat. In this episode we talked about: ...

Nemailla Bonturi is the co-founder of ÄIO, an Estonian startup fermenting fats and oils from yeast instead of palm oil or animal products. A Brazilian scientist-turned-founder, Nemailla now works at the intersection of synthetic biology, circular economy, and baked goods—with an in-house chef, of course. In this episode we talked about: 🧫 How a “very special yeast” turns sawdust and stale bread into palm oil alternatives 🌍 Why Estonia is a unicorn factory 🥐 A plant-based but...

Eugene Beh is the founder of Quino Energy, where he’s commercializing organic flow batteries that are safer, cheaper, and more scalable than their vanadium and lithium-ion cousins. With a background in physics and chemistry from Harvard and Stanford, Eugene has traded academic labs for chemical plants—and he’s betting that petroleum byproducts might just be the unlikely hero of long-duration energy storage. In this episode we talked about: 🔋 Why Quino's aqueous organic flow batteries do...

Selina Tobaccowala is a Silicon Valley veteran turned climate entrepreneur. With hits like Evite, Ticketmaster, and SurveyMonkey on her resume, she’s now taking aim at one of the biggest sources of residential emissions: energy inefficiency. Through her startup HomeBoost, she’s making home energy assessments as simple as scanning your walls with your phone. In this episode we talked about: 🔍 How HomeBoost uses AI and thermal imagery to let you run your own home energy audit 💡 Why the hu...

Leise Sandeman is co-founder of Pathways, a company using AI to make heavy manufacturing more sustainable. Based in Copenhagen, she brings deep expertise in steel production and AI to the challenge of industrial decarbonization. In this episode we talked about: 🏭 How Pathways is building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing, with their software now deployed across hundreds of plants ⚡ The current reality where sustainability teams spend 90% of their time collecting data and only 10% i...

Eric Rubenstein is an oil and gas banker turned climate tech investor based in Houston. As founder of New Climate Ventures, he focuses on bridging the gap between traditional energy and climate innovation, bringing a pragmatic perspective shaped by his background in finance and fossil fuels. In this episode we talked about: 🌡️ The critical need for more power generation capacity and why we need both renewable and reliable energy sources with built-in redundancy 📊 How the ability to measure an...

Julia Bialetska is the founder of S.Lab, a Ukrainian company creating sustainable packaging solutions from agricultural waste. In this episode we talked about: 🌱 How S.Lab transforms agricultural waste into packaging that can be used in food, pharmaceuticals, electronics, furniture and fashion 📊 The impact of EU regulations requiring all packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2030, and why that means companies are rushing to find sustainable alternatives ⚙️ The parallels between today's su...

Jannik De Winter is an investor at PT1, a Berlin-based VC focused on greening the built environment. He recently co-authored a white paper on adaptation tech—the technologies we’ll need now that we’ve officially blown past 1.5°C. We talked about why climate resilience is an investment opportunity, not just a government expense, and why adaptation tech is still so poorly defined. We touched on: 🔥 How climate adaptation tech is more than just seawalls and sandbags—it includes urban cooling, cli...

Chris Bernkopf is the founder of Podero, a tech company that helps utilities balance power loads by controlling distributed energy resources like heat pumps, batteries, and EVs. Fresh off a major fundraising round, he's building his remote-first team to expand across Europe while delivering 25% energy savings to customers. In this episode we talked about: 🔌 How Podero's software enables utilities to aggregate and trade power from customer-owned devices on energy markets 🌏 How growing up watch...

Jess Clemans is an investor at noa, a VC that is raising its second €250M fund focused on making the built environment more sustainable. In this episode we talked about: 🎯 Why noa prioritizes founder quality over business ideas or market attractiveness when making investment decisions 💰 How customer acquisition costs for solar installations can reach an eye-watering $10k, while local SMBs achieve much lower costs through word-of-mouth 👷 The critical shortage of skilled labor for solar i...

Matthew Krayton directs communications and engagement for MACH2, the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub. As someone who both works in-depth on the policy side but who is also focused on execution, Matt is working to establish regional clean hydrogen hubs across several states. 🇺🇸 In this episode we talked about: 🏭 How the Mid-Atlantic region's existing industrial infrastructure, including unused pipelines, could be repurposed for hydrogen transport 💼 The hub's goal to create over 20,000 new...

Rob van Straten is CEO of Skytree, a direct air capture company addressing CO2 shortages while removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. In this episode we talked about: 🌱 How Skytree's direct air capture technology helps greenhouses meet their CO2 needs while contributing to carbon removal 🏗️ The challenge of scaling DAC to gigaton levels - requiring 300 container ships worth of units with current technology 💰 Why carbon removal is already economically viable, but needs a wider cost gap...