One of the 2023 mantras for my firm Energize Capital has been: “There has never been a better time to work in climate software.” From the billions of dollars entering the space through private and public investments to cultural shifts toward mission-driven careers, the influx of talent we’ve seen come into the climate space has been incredible.
Recently, the climate tech sector reached a new talent milestone: attracting and retaining seasoned tech executives. Many growing climate companies are hiring for certain C-suite level positions – such as Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Revenue Officers – for the first time, and traditional SaaS executives are entering the climate space to fill the roles.
Why now? The climate market has reached a point where it is both good for the world and good for customers’ wallets. Climate companies are growing into resilient businesses with sizeable annual recurring revenues. As those companies scale, they become capable of supporting more executive-level positions – and they increasingly require those executives’ expertise. More and more climate companies are recruiting people who have experience expanding internationally, lobbying, creating paths to public markets, and all the other business functions needed by large companies.
To highlight this blossoming area of the climate workforce, Energize has interviewed a roster of impressive talent who have joined our own portfolio in the last year from leadership roles at major tech companies like WhatsApp and Robinhood. Here they share their backgrounds, their motivations for switching to a career in climate and the knowledge they’re transferring from their time in traditional tech.
Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Matthew Idema, President & Chief Operating Officer at Aurora Solar
Started role: June 2023
Before working in climate: Matt worked at Meta for 12 years, joining the company in 2010 to work on products to help small- and medium-sized businesses use Facebook, including Facebook Pages and Promoted Posts. He was appointed to Facebook’s ads leadership team in 2013 to run product marketing and help build Facebook’s mobile ad business. He went on to be WhatsApp’s first COO focused on building out the marketing, sales, partnerships and analytics teams, and establishing the company’s business models.
What made you want to work for a climate-focused company?
After experiencing incredible scale at Meta, I was excited to get back to a growth-stage company. I wanted to find something that could have an impact on a global scale and to work on a problem I’d be really proud to help solve. Being a part of the solution to climate change and the world’s energy transition was exactly the type of impact I was looking for. Aurora, the only truly scaled software platform in solar, is built on strong engineering and has been led by impressive co-founders who have attracted strong talent.
How are you applying your technology background to your new role?
The most successful businesses I’ve been a part of combined technology leadership with a clear ROI for customers. This is important for any company, but especially right now in climate tech as there’s so much happening all at once. We need to make sure the things we’re building translate into clear customer benefits.
Additionally, the best product wins. And the best products are built with the best engineering. At Aurora, that means combining our incredible datasets and machine learning to create accurate designs that save our customers time and give homeowners and businesses confidence in the system they are purchasing.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your previous work that could be beneficial to the climate landscape?
Companies that are truly mission-driven attract the best talent. I continue to be so impressed with our people. Some of the best and brightest people are joining this industry in order to be a part of – and accelerate – important change.
What advice would you give others interested in working in climate for the first time?
Now is the time to make the leap. The cost of renewable energy has reached a point where adoption will happen rapidly over the next decade, but there are still so many problems to solve. Lean into the skills you already have and determine how you can apply them in this industry to truly make an impact. It is an exciting time to be in climate tech – we’re all figuring it out and growing together.
Laura Huddle, Chief Revenue Officer at Smartcar
Started role: September 2022
Before working in climate: Laura has held roles throughout tech, including SEO and performance marketing at Myspace, product management and expansion in the Asian Pacific region at Eventbrite
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What made you want to work for a climate-focused company?
I found a copy of “The End of Nature” by Bill McKibben years ago and while it struck me as a bit alarmist at the time, it has stuck in my head over the years as we’ve set record temperatures year after year. As my career progressed, I’ve been looking for the right opportunity to get into climate tech, and I couldn’t be happier Smartcar came along at the right time.
How are you applying your technology background to your new role?
I believe some things are universal across tech: understand your customers, build a great product to solve their problems, and support them every step of the way to achieve success together. At Smartcar, these tenets continue to drive our partnerships with amazing climate tech innovators.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your previous work that could be beneficial to the climate landscape?
“Features tell, benefits sell” is a lesson a mentor burned into my brain years ago. For any technology to be successful, you have to be great at explaining why someone benefits from your solution. Many potential customers cannot see the immediate benefit of choosing technology that has a better climate impact; this is something the industry needs to master to drive adoption.
What advice would you give others interested in working in climate for the first time?
It’s an “everyone” problem. There’s no one solution to fixing our climate issues, and all skills and backgrounds can contribute to the solutions. You don’t need a specific skill set to work in climate tech, and there’s no better time than now to join the effort to fight climate change!
Jean Bredeche, Head of Engineering at Patch
Started role: October 2022
Before working in climate: Jean started his career as the first engineering hire for a startup making financial research solutions and later co-founded Quantopian, a crowd-sourced quantitative investment company whose technology was acquired by Robinhood in 2020. Prior to joining Patch, he supported several product engineering teams for Robinhood, while also helping with technical due diligence, engineering hiring, and expanding the NYC office.
What made you want to work for a climate-focused company?
There are many big problems in the world, but climate might be the biggest one. Having children made me realize that my time is limited, and I wanted to work on something that would directly benefit their future well-being. For a while, I thought you needed to have a PhD in a hard science to contribute to the climate effort. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that software has a role in climate as well. I’m using my experience to build software at Patch that can be used to build marketplaces and connect and accelerate activity among various marketplace participants.
How are you applying your technology background to your new role?
Compared to the equities market, the carbon markets are far less mature. We’re discovering how the various market participants interact with one another and with regulatory bodies. Just like iterating on a consumer product, it’s critical that we move quickly and safely and optimize our processes for delivering value to our customers. A startup’s biggest strength is its ability to focus on a problem and move fast, and this is just as true in climate tech as in my previous experiences.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your previous work that could be beneficial to the climate landscape?
My experience in the fintech space has shown me that marketplaces work when there’s a high level of trust and transparency in the framework, rules and recourse options. This applies more than ever for the carbon markets, given how nascent they are. In addition, climate tech is so new and so multi-faceted that it requires a lot of consumer education. Why is it important? How do the carbon markets work? This is something Patch is really focusing on, and I think it makes a big difference.
What advice would you give others interested in working in climate for the first time?
Don’t let a lack of specialized climate knowledge deter you from joining the field. We need all the help we can get! But once you’re in, it’s important to immerse yourself and learn about this rapidly evolving space that is critically important to the future of our children and their children.
Started role: July 2023
Before working in climate: Katie has worked in SaaS for more than 13 years, focusing on B2B markets at Hightail, Reputation.com, BrightEdge, and, most recently, DroneDeploy (also an Energize portfolio company), where she helped the company reach the 5,000-customer milestone, double their annual recurring revenue, and achieve a four-fold increase in annual contract value.
What made you want to work for a climate-focused company?
The future is scary when you read the news about (and experience for myself) fires, heat waves and severe storms. I have little kids, and the reality that my experience with the world will be very different from theirs makes me feel helpless. I want the world to be safe and livable for them and future generations. I have been doing my part to lower my carbon footprint, water intake and plastic usage as much as possible, but it feels overwhelming that you are not doing enough. Banyan Infrastructure’s vision takes something complex and new — financing renewable infrastructure — and makes it simple, easy, and rewarding for our customers. We are helping the project finance industry move faster by digitizing, automating and simplifying its processes and bringing much-needed transparency on risk and project viability. It’s the decade of deployment, and tools like Banyan are needed to bridge the multi-trillion-dollar investment gap to reach net zero by 2050.
How are you applying your technology background to your new role?
Banyan is selling enterprise SaaS in the simplest form. My career has taught me the tried-and-true processes and frameworks needed to sell and market to any enterprise effectively. Banyan’s customers are trying to move faster and with more transparency, and those value propositions are similar in all enterprise SaaS offerings — saving time, cutting costs and automating insights to discover value.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your previous work that could be beneficial to the climate landscape?
Climate tech works with many older, slower-moving industries like utilities, banks, and capital markets. I’ve seen firsthand how to move some of these industries to adopt modern technologies and accelerate them through digital transformation and value creation. In my past roles, I have worked with many industries new to disruption, like construction. Banyan Infrastructure is defining a new category that takes a lot of education and customer support to drive a significant change in the industry. Marketing can help by defining strong messaging and market segmentation that drives educational and thought leadership strategies and campaigns to support sales and growth.
What advice would you give others interested in working in climate for the first time?
It is rewarding to work in a mission-driven industry solving one of the most existential challenges we face in the next decade. And with the energy transition comes a massive economic opportunity. I am already loving it and excited for the future to help build a large, enduring, category-defining company in climate!
Tim Koubek, Chief Revenue Officer at Sitetracker
Started role: Early 2023
Before working in climate: Tim has spent most of his career in SaaS sales as a leader, Chief Revenue Officer and strategic leader within the organization. He has held titles including CRO, COO and CEO. Most recently, he was the SVP of Sales-Americas for LogicMonitor, a Vista-owned company.
What made you want to work for a climate-focused company?
The passion for the industries we are targeting is shown in everyone I have met at Sitetracker. That shared passion for the work and the industries we are serving was a major attraction. Add to that, the vision that our investors and our CEO have for making a difference in the world while still creating a company that is growing and on a path to profitability made Sitetracker a company I wanted to be a part of.
How are you applying your technology background to your new role?
When leading, you have to listen to your team, your prospects and your customers. You need to focus on customers where we have the right to win. Sitetracker has a proven product-market fit with alternative energy companies further illustrating our right to win in this market.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your previous work that could be beneficial to the climate landscape?
Many tech companies try to be everything to every company. What has worked for me in the past that I can apply to the current climate tech landscape is to stay focused on solutions that benefit customers today. Do not try to solve everything, instead, focus on what you do well to make your customers more successful.
What advice would you give others interested in working in climate for the first time?
We are all looking for purpose in our work. For me, that comes from wanting to make a difference in the world and in people’s lives. That takes commitment every day and your passion will make a difference in your success and overall satisfaction with your job.
Adrienne Gormley, Independent Board Director at Monta
Started role: January 2023
Before working in climate: Adrienne has worked in the tech sector for over 25 years, helping companies that are disrupters in their space scale and grow. Previously, she worked at N26, a startup disrupting banking and fintech across Europe. She currently serves on the boards at Nordic tech unicorns Pleo and Epidemic Sound.
What made you want to join a climate-focused company?
I’m privileged to have built my career across multiple segments in technology, and, for me, climate tech is currently the segment with huge opportunities for growth. It’s exciting to be able to leverage my experience toward a critical environmental cause and to help achieve scale and growth in a way that’s both sustainable for Monta and the planet.
How are you applying your technology background to your new role?
Growing and scaling organizations is my specialty. I love developing a strategy and vision and helping to execute toward those goals. I’m also aware of the challenges surrounding fast growth in a nascent industry. While EV charging isn’t currently a highly regulated industry, my time in fintech taught me the value and importance of creating growth that works within market dynamics to deliver a positive result for customers and for users.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your previous work that could be beneficial to the climate landscape?
Understanding the product-market fit and ruthlessly exploiting it. Climate tech is relevant in every market at the moment, but some are more prepared for tech solutions than others. We have to be flexible and responsive to create products that satisfy the market’s current needs and account for the rapid development of those needs over time.
What advice would you give others interested in joining the climate sector for the first time?
The climate sector is a great opportunity to connect passion and purpose to real world experience. Lots of organizations are newly formed, are breaking new ground, and need experienced hands whose values are aligned. There’s never been a better time to find satisfying and meaningful work within tech, whether that’s in climate tech or other sectors.
Lisa Travnik, Vice President of Revenue Operations at Sourcemap
Started role: April 2023
Before working in climate: Lisa has worked as an operator, strategic advisor and investor in privately backed, growth-stage SaaS companies for about 11 years. Most recently, she served as the VP of Business Operations for Beyond, a Bessemer portfolio company that provides property management software for the short-term rental industry.
What made you want to work for a climate-focused company?
Since before going to business school, I’ve been looking for ways to work in impact tech. For me, key areas of interest have always been climate, education and healthcare — areas I have seen as more nascent when it comes to technology, where one can see great potential for immediate positive impact and growth. During COVID I took on a few personal projects in the climate space, but I quickly realized several things that made me even more interested in finding a way to intersect my professional skills in software with climate. First, that it’s nearly impossible, as an individual, to make changes at scale. And second, taking a pro-business approach by offering technology that enables large enterprises to meet their climate goals tends to be the quickest way to make the biggest impact.
How are you applying your technology background to your new role?
For technology startups to scale beyond the initial stage of early adoption, they need to find a growth template and operating rhythm that serves them. Building systems that align with the buyer’s journey, optimizing the sales cycle and understanding market conditions are ways to unlock growth in any company. Additionally, Sourcemap is climate tech, but it’s also supply chain technology, and our buyers are often driven, at least in part, by the incredibly dynamic nature of the regulatory landscape in supply chains right now. I’ve worked with SaaS companies in the past that were similarly impacted by compliance dynamics, as well as companies at this stage, so there are a lot of parallels from past roles.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your previous work that could be beneficial to the climate landscape?
Based on my experience, making decisions too slowly at this stage is worse than making the “wrong” choice. I’m helping ensure that we have the right decision-making structures in place to prevent slowdowns due to indecision. The buying patterns, top-of-funnel strategies and pipeline management frameworks a company uses in its very early days need to shift once it’s serving a more dynamic customer base and as the product offering expands. I am helping us settle more quickly on an evolutionary path so we can move into that next stage of growth without getting caught in some of the growing pains I’ve seen at other companies.
What advice would you give others interested in working in climate for the first time?
Don’t get caught up in not having come from a climate background. The space is growing quickly, and once firms get past the very early stages, they’re more open to hiring from outside the industry. This is especially true if they are selling to non-climate customers. Think critically about why you want to be somewhere and what you can bring to the table on the growth journey – and then just go for it.
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