Chris Brereton: The People are the thing that make the thing real.

Chris Brereton is a technology executive and investor specializing in climate tech and digital infrastructure. As Chief Product Officer at MARA and Head of US Investments at MOHARA, he leverages his extensive product leadership experience to drive innovation. Chris is passionate about mentoring startups and investing in technologies that improve climate solutions and sustainability. His expertise is focused on creating impactful solutions in clean energy.

Transcript

The planet, we're big fans, and it needs some help. We're gonna skip the part where we convince you that humans have caused a tremendous change in the climate since roughly the 1700s. We're also going to skip over a bunch of terrifying statistics and doom and gloom stories.

We know you've heard all of that. We are regular people, you might say climate curious, that want to help and don't know where we can jump in yet. Welcome to Team Climate, a show about what it really looks like to do climate work.

This is real, and this is bigger than all of us, and it's going to take all of us to change it. My name is Jeffrey Brian Potter. I'm a senior product designer in the FinTech space.

My co-host, Kristen Shaw, is the head of growth for a consulting agency, and the national marketing chair for a clean tech accelerator. Each episode, we're going to be talking with someone in the field, doing the real work it takes to make change. We hope this inspires you to jump in too, because we're going to need you.

So I'm going to start recording.

Great.

And watch Kristen shrink into the walls.

I'm overcoming a fear, so good exercise.

I love that you're overcoming a fear and doing it live, which is not easy.

So we are here today with Christopher Brereton. We're happy to have him, and I love your telecaster on the wall. Which no one will see because this is a podcast.

How are you?

I'm doing great. Thank you guys for having me. And good call on the tele.

I had a call earlier today where someone was like, sweet strap. I was like, almost. Bender, give you that one.

Yeah, my friend. So we'd love for you to just maybe high level at first, give us a little taste of your current position, and what the day-to-day looks like.

Sure. My current position is interesting because I'm doing many different things at the same time. I think the one that is probably most relevant.

Well, they're both relevant, but I'm working as a fractional executive as my day-to-day. My main client is a company called Marathon Digital Holdings. They're the largest utility scale Bitcoin mining company.

And what I'm working on over there is all their energy management and intelligence layer on how we do mining to be the most efficient we can be with the energy we consume and consume the most clean energy we possibly can consume. So we can geek out on that stuff. And then my other day job is I'm venture investing out of a fund in London called Mahara.

And my focus there is climate, healthcare, and digital infrastructure, which you can call blockchain or Bitcoin, one of those digital infrastructure pieces. We could talk about some of the interesting climate things we're looking at, hopefully investing in on that front as well. And then I also have a sort of group of folks that were just getting off the ground called the Advisory Collective, which is a bunch of other fractional executive level folks working like myself that are working together to help each other find clients and build their businesses.

So go in any of those paths.

Explain a little bit about what a fractional executive does.

I stretch myself across too many companies and never stop working. The intent was to work part time essentially for two to three companies at a time. I have a bit more of a portfolio approach to my professional life as opposed to being all in on one company at any given point in time, which hasn't made me work any less.

It's definitely added more hours to the schedule, but I'm having a lot of fun.

So is the selling point to you the executive part or the working toward climate causes part?

It's more working towards the climate causes part. I'm interested in building things that help make the world a little bit better. And that's sort of how I got into climate a handful of years back.

But I've always been trying to use my forte as a software person or a creative to make things that hopefully make the world a little bit better. And I've never really wanted to just have a job to chase a paycheck. So this is my way of earning a living and hopefully making a positive impact.

Did you have, you must have had other positions before this. And what sort of made you tip the scales?

The path to climate was, it seemed like one of the most important problems to focus my time and energy on. And I was able to find an early stage company in Santa Monica, where I spent a lot of my time growing up and building my first business that was just starting to attack that same problem. And so I got to join that company early and get really, really exposed to the clean energy part of the story of the climate change movement.

And the fun part of that story is it was a successful one. We sold that company to Shell about five or so years ago. And I just got enmeshed through that experience.

Was that a typical hiring? Was that a resume, interviews, the usual bit?

It was the usual like, know somebody that's already part of the company or has a connection to the company. And they were looking for somebody who did what I did. And fortunately, at the time, I had just previously sold a business of my own and was bouncing around a couple of different ideas.

I was working on this music licensing thing, and I had just left a sort of contract project for a big global software company and wasn't quite sure where I was going to go next, but was looking for something meaningful. And this entrepreneur was someone I had friends, shared friends with, that I linked up with.

So day to day, what's that look like?

It looks like a lot of context switching these days. Typically, marathons might premiere number one anchor client, so they get the majority of my time. So I usually start my day and end my day on the marathon stuff, and then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, almost primarily marathon.

But in between sort of scattered in where it needs to be is a lot of the venture investing stuff. And so I'm spending a ton of time meeting with early stage entrepreneurs trying to do interesting, incredible things, and trying to vet out whether I believe they've got the chops or not to make that thing true, or at least the people around them to help them get there, and then whether or not that fits into our sort of thesis or where we want to invest. So lots of focused on energy management software, or then switching into like research and learn mode.

So what would a typical, I wouldn't say client, candidate look like that would come to you?

On the investing side?

Yeah.

The way I would describe the folks we're looking for is founder market fit. So somebody who's got like domain expertise in the space that they want to build in. We are looking for super early stage companies.

So very much pre-seed, sometimes seed around investments. Like we'll invest up to 750,000 per deal that we do. So it's not a huge check, but it's definitely a bigger one in the earlier stages for some of these folks.

And so I'm trying to find people that are maybe living on friends and family. Hopefully, I have a little bit of revenue or some version of a proof of concept in market and a little bit of at least market validation in terms of the size of the market. The problem is real and we can bet those things that far up.

Are you saying in energy? Are you saying particularly in energy and are you software only or software and hardware?

Software and hardware, but we primarily are software people. So we know that space better. If you start getting too far into the hardware space, I start getting dumb.

So I'm definitely looking for software plus hardware, not just hardware. But no, I'm looking at mobility, energy efficiency, grid management stuff, climate risk, emissions tracking, carbon marketplaces, all that kind of stuff that has like a software enabler to make those things true. We're definitely not getting into the big hard tech like carbon capture stuff.

So we just don't have the capital to invest that way.

How long did you say you've been doing this?

I've been doing the venture stuff for, I guess it's almost eight months now.

Okay.

Started this year.

So are you starting to notice patterns? Are you able to see from a little bit of a distance? Like they're gonna get go far.

They're not.

I think the patterns are less about the businesses and more about the people is what I'm experiencing so far. There have been, and we'll see if any of these things prove out after the investments either do or don't return. But the folks that I think I'm most drawn to definitely have high conviction and have found a way to make this thing be true, even with the tremendous amount of risk in front of them.

And that shows up in both the confidence in like their delivery and excitement for the thing that they are investing in risking a lot for. But it's also this sort of like ability to see around corners and describe to me why the external forces are going to drive this thing forward in ways that I probably wouldn't see on my own unless I heard these folks talk and then go do my own research after the fact to see if I believe them. And it's pretty cool to talk to a bunch of really friggin smart humans all day that make me feel real dumb.

Part of this, I think, the intended audience is college and just post-college that are looking to figure out what their career is going to be. And so how would you explain to them, they've got some idea for a thing that saves wind in a jar and whatever? How would you guide them along?

Sure. I think I'd break this up two different ways. One is if they're entrepreneurial and seeking to build their own business, I'd say start now.

You have almost no risk. You have a lot of time to correct if for some reason this thing doesn't work. Just try.

Start and try now. And spend a ton of time talking to other folks and building a network around what it is you're doing. Because the more you talk to people about the thing you're doing, the more feedback you're going to get, there's going to be a number of gems in that feedback that can really change the way the thing you're working on can become real and true.

If you're looking for a job and you're not the entrepreneurial person that's coming out of school or just out of school, I think the thing I would point towards is try to care more about the people you're working with as opposed to the thing you're working on or the brand of the thing that you're working on. Because the thing that's going to make you great at creating value, which hopefully that's what you do in a role at a business, is help them create value in some meaningful way, is going to be accelerated if you're around a lot of smart people that help you grow in your profession. And that matters way more than putting a cool logo on your resume, I think.

Agreed.

Has there been an interesting challenge that you have felt like you overcome?

There's been so many. One challenge that I guess is a lesson that I'm actively striving to not replay in my current efforts is when I worked for Inspire, Clean Energy was the company that we sold to Shell. I worked there for a period of time.

I left to go do a startup of my own, and then I came back to continue on the Inspire mission because it was just too big and too meaningful to leave entirely. I couldn't get it out of my head even when I left. So when I went back, one of the mistakes that I made was just blindly believing what the CEO told me was the number one most important problem for me to solve in my role.

And I came in like a bull in a china cabinet, ready to make sure that I solved that problem no matter what. And it was the wrong problem to solve, I think, at the beginning of coming back. And I only learned that six or so months into what it was that we were working on when I was sitting in a sales meeting and realized the thing that I was building towards and spending a boatload of money and time on and recruiting a team around was like sub 5% of our overall sales.

And so the attach rate for what we were doing had very little chance to be successful, even in the grand scheme of what we were up to. And it was 95% of where I was focused. So that sucked, and I don't want to do that again.

And I overcame that by getting incredibly humble with the rest of my executive team and pointing out that I think I'm doing this wrong. Please help me see the right thing to spend my time on and help me course correct here. This time around, when I'm coming in, I'm working with the new executive team.

I'm not on the executive team at Marathon. I'm a fractional consultant, and I've been pulled in to work on a very specific problem, but I'm trying to make sure that I'm asking the deep and tough questions that the problem I'm working on actually isn't a distraction from something that matters more.

I think that's great advice. I had an amazing GM early in my career when I was at Under Armour, who the first piece of advice he told everyone when they first came on board was like, for the next 30 days, I just want you to observe. You should do work, but primarily observe what's going on.

Observe. And then you would meet with him weekly and discuss observations. And I think, yeah, and there were some people that did it, and some people that were like, I don't need to do that.

I know everything. And they would usually not last very long.

Right. Well, and also for him, what a great feedback loop, right? Every new person who joins the team is giving him fresh observations.

And that's a double win, I think, on that.

He was a great guy.

So Chris, on the opposite side, if I understand how this works right, you have investors that you're courting to come and invest in this cause and that cause and etc. Has that been challenging, like to sell environment causes? Is it still a spooky thing?

I don't think so. So it works a little bit differently than that. It's not so much that we got to go find one-off investors to invest in the deals.

We've got a handful of LPs that put together a $50 million fund as our fund one. And that fund has a thesis, and we have a process for deploying that capital. So we're already sort of pointed at climate, health tech, and digital infrastructure.

We know those are things we want to invest that capital into. We're just trying to make sure we make the best bets with the 38 or so bets we can make with that fund along the way. And that's where the LPs do play a hand in helping us determine which ones we want to invest in.

They don't necessarily say yes or no. They bought into the fund, and the fund is going to have a performance. But when we're stuck or when we're trying to choose between two or three things, they help us play tiebreaker sometimes.

So you say the word bets. So has there been bad bets? Don't say any names.

It's too early to tell, but I'm sure there will be a few.

Okay.

That's kind of the way these things work, I guess, at the end of the day, as many listeners probably have heard already. But we're really building a portfolio of bets, and we're hoping two in 10 of those pay off huge and pay for the other eight.

Really, that's the success rate that you hope for.

Yeah.

So that was my next thought was, have you been there long enough to see good bets pay off?

No.

I guess is not yet.

Yeah, not yet. So the venture fund cycle is about 10 years. We're eight months in, and the fund itself, I'm not even going to share the name of the fund because it's not even publicly announced yet.

It's that early. So we're doing deals and ready to announce them soon, but it will probably be more like end of August, when we can start actually publicly disclosing who we've invested in and where we're going.

So one of the things when you're thinking about working in climate, one of the things you have to figure out is what sectors within the climate industry, right? Circular, you've got waste, you've got energy, you've got EV, you've got, there's a million of them. From your observations in these eight months, are you seeing, where's the excitement?

Where's the most innovation? Which kind of sector has got you most excited right now?

Yeah, there are a ton. There's, I'm pulling up my little list. You guys can't see what's going on on my screen, but I have 60 different sectors, is how I've broken it out based on a bunch of different people's versions of this story.

Everything from like steel, cement, chemicals, energy efficiency, like we talked about, construction or like the built environment. There's climate risk, there's mobility, there's so many different big buckets of things to look into. So saying climate is like saying basically, I'm looking at the whole world if I just say climate.

Our world gets a little narrower relatively quick because we're focused primarily on like software enabled businesses. That doesn't mean they need to be or identify as like a software company, but software has to give them a scale enablement opportunity. And so that narrows the field quite a bit and gets us closer to the like climate risk, efficiency tracking, energy management systems.

That kind of mobility is definitely in the mix for us because there's a lot of like on board software for all kinds of things going on in the mobility space. On the energy efficiency side, then you can break it down into like heating and cooling or you can get to EV charging or you can get to battery. There's nuance there.

So where we see a lot of the stuff that we end up zooming in on is related to that kind of like software enabled consumer experience stuff as opposed to the like harder core shit like metals and mining and building materials and construction and carbon capture. And so I just see less of those things, I guess.

That's cool. After you and I met the first time, I did a bunch of research into greater optimization.

Oh, cool.

Just to learn more about it because I had only, I knew about it but only on the peripheral. And now there's like a couple of companies that I'm a little bit obsessed with like Line Vision.

Yeah.

Really killing it right now. I've been watching them and aggressively trying to network and not that I'm trying to work there necessarily, but I've been like trying to meet people that work there.

Hi, I'm Kristen.

Yeah, maybe. But when you're learning about climate, like grid optimization doesn't seem, it doesn't draw you in, like it doesn't have like that super sexy appeal that EVs have. So when I started digging into it, I was like, oh, this is fascinating.

Like there's a whole world here. Yeah, totally.

There is a whole world.

What's wild about the grid optimization stuff is we actually produce way more clean energy than we end up using because of grid congestion and transmission and delivery and time of day when those things are producing versus when energy is being consumed. And so it's a really fun, fascinating space. Like we actually overproduce clean energy that we don't end up utilizing.

So how might we use other technologies that can use that power in a positive way, which is where the Bitcoin stuff came from for me.

So with such a long lead time before you see impact, how do you kind of stay moving, stay motivated?

Yeah, so a couple of different ways. One thing that makes the fund unique outside of like a typical venture fund is it was started by a company that's a 13-year-old custom software company. So one of the things we do is invest capital, but then we also invest software development services as part of the investment.

So we get to stay close to the entrepreneurs, keep their costs down so they don't have to hire a bunch of expensive software developers. We help them get their products to market quicker because they're working with our in-house product team and our in-house engineering teams. So we actually get to build with the founders often, which is really fun, keeps us connected, and also de-risk the investment by keeping their costs low and keeping us paying attention to what's happening inside the business.

So it's a fun version of investing, I think, that plays into my strengths as a product person. That's one way. The other way is, we are investing up to $750K in the first round for each of these companies, but that reserves $18 million of the $50 million left for follow-on funds.

That we want to make sure the companies that do break out of that first wave of, let's call it the first 10, and we need one of those to be working, that one should have access to more capital from us than we have in our reserves for follow-on funding. So that keeps us in the game longer over time, I suppose.

Do you offer additional support? Like, do you have like, do you offer like ops and sales, like depending on where they are as a fund?

The fund does not, but that's sort of where my third thing, the advisory collective is coming in, is I'm already realizing and seeing the need for a lot of these companies to have like a fractional salesperson or an ops person or wherever their particular weakness is. And that's not a business that the fund or the product studio wants to get into, but it's something that I find a lot of fun as we're building businesses and supporting entrepreneurs. How can I pull my network of folks in to help them be more and more successful?

Well, again, keeping their costs low is possible. So instead of hiring a full-time sales exec, can I go find the best guy who's willing to work for an extra 10 hours a week on the side and help that founder figure out how to do it on their own and guide them at a much smaller clip, even if it's for a small period of time, six to 12 months, to get them up and running. That sort of helps de-risk the portfolio even more.

Yeah, that's something I've been observing since moving over and having some exposure on the climate tech side as I was like, there's a lot of need for operations, sales, marketing, even like founder support, like EA kind of support for these founders for working every minute that they're awake.

Yep. Yeah, and there's a whole world of fractional happening all of a sudden, which is kind of cool. It's like, I feel like in the last year, year and a half, all of a sudden, there's more and more people trying to work that way.

I don't know if that's a temporary byproduct of half a million people in tech being laid off or not having a job and claiming they're working fractional or what, but it seems to be a trend at the moment.

Let's take a quick break.

Transitioning to a greener economy could create 24 million new jobs by 2030, according to the International Labor Organization. And about 30% of roles in the climate space don't require technical expertise. Skills in marketing, sales, policy, business operations, or communications are in high demand.

That means your experience might already be more relevant to you than you think. If you're curious about diving into climate work, here are a few ideas to get started. Research and apply for roles in rapidly growing sectors like renewable energy, EV infrastructure, and carbon markets.

These areas are booming with opportunities for fresh talent. Volunteering with climate-focused nonprofits is a great way to build relevant experience, expand your network, and see firsthand what climate work looks like. And remember, networking is key.

Eighty-five percent of jobs are filled through connections. Communities like My Climate Journey, Work on Climate, and Terra.do are fantastic Slack communities to meet like-minded individuals and learn from others already in the field. You can find the links in the episode notes.

So do you go to a brick and mortar office? Are you mostly from home?

I work mostly from home, calling from my home office at the moment. I do have a shared workspace that I rent here in Portland, Oregon, from a company called Upstart Collective, which is a cool thing happening here in town. There's a couple of different offices that they've rented and put desks and conference spaces and stuff in, and they offer it up to solopreneurs or early stage entrepreneurs to have cost-effective work space.

And so I have a rotating desk there that I pay monthly for, which is just something that I more contribute to, to see the community thrive than I use, but it's a cool space to take meetings once in a while. And so, yeah, I have a place I can go if I need to, but I work from home mostly.

Are there sometimes events and things you can attend?

There are. Upstart does a ton of stuff here in town. There's usually like four or five things a month going on over at the Upstart office, which is another fun reason to be a member here in Portland.

But I also host a thing called Health Tech Hangs once a month, where myself and a bunch of other health tech execs get together and just sort of support each other and keep each other going. I have another thing called PDX Hang, which is more of a creative thing than it is a tech or climate specific thing, where there's a horror movie writer in the group, and there's a couple songwriters in the group. There's some designers in the group.

There's all those different professions that don't necessarily neatly fit into health or climate. But all those people end up having some connection to these different companies. So I find little ways to keep myself connected to the community.

And then Portland's got a pretty decent startup scene. It's very different than Santa Monica, California, where I spent most of my time. Yeah, I bet.

Which definitely is a lot more active than I think Portland, Oregon is. So I find myself back in LA, often jumping down to events.

Well, I lived in LA for a while, as well as I mentioned earlier. And yeah, it's active, but you got to sort the wheat from the chaff there. Like everybody has an app that they're about to launch tomorrow.

Okay.

That's so true.

So you feel supported in your community and what you would call your coworkers?

Yeah. As a solo work from home person, I feel like I've had to go create that community for myself outside of my work environment. But I've actively invested in that over the last year and a half or so when I realized, like, oh shit, this working from home thing is cool, but I miss people.

Yeah.

So I've forced myself to create little communities. I've been joining other little things. I joined a thing up here called Soho House that we had down in LA.

It's like a social club and that's a fun way to meet other entrepreneurs and host meetings that are not in my bedroom, in my office, my home office bedroom. And then in terms of work, the different teams that I'm on are very team-driven type organizations. So I'm not doing a bunch of deep work by myself within those companies.

I'm actually like a part of a much larger organization. For marathons specifically, there's like five different teams or pods, squads, whatever you're used to calling them, that I'm working with and across. On the energy side of things, at Mojara, there's 150 folks on that team.

The investing team is pretty small. There's about five of us total, but there are 150 folks working on projects and building stuff that I often get to jump in and help out on. And I find ways to collab.

What's the thing you missed most about the office life?

Walk and talks. Yeah. Easily walk and talks.

I used to take as many of my one-on-ones as I could side by side, walking around the neighborhood. And in the Inspire office that we moved to, the last one that we were in, there was a walking track around the second floor also, which was pretty sweet. We could just jump out on the second floor and lap the building a few times.

Yeah. Walk and talks are great. I'm trying to do it more and more in my headphones.

It's just not quite the same.

Have you encountered something that you didn't think you could do? And then it turns out you overcame it?

I think that's like everything I've ever done. That's the story behind each of these things. So I guess I'd like to be slightly uncomfortable and take on things that feel just outside of my current capacity, because it helps me grow and grow quickly.

When I went to Inspire originally, I didn't really know anything about clean energy. I knew how to build software products, but I didn't know anything about the energy vertical. And I was forced to learn really, really quickly how that all looked enacted, and learn new language, and all these different professional skills that come with that space that I wasn't privy to at all.

With what I'm doing at Marathon, I really don't know that much about the Bitcoin world. I know way more about the energy world than I know about software, but I'm learning a boatload about Bitcoin mining that I didn't know that much about. I have some Bitcoin, but I didn't really know that much about it.

It was more of a curiosity than it was a profession. So I keep finding myself in these places where there's like this new thing that pushes my boundary a little bit, but it forces me to grow and adapt and learn quickly.

Do you think, is energy old enough for you to find mentors?

Energy is I think the oldest machine we, or at least the grid, is the oldest machine we've made in the US.

Right. That's true.

There are definitely some great mentors in the energy space. My former CEO, Patrick Maloney from Inspire, was a huge mentor for me and still a good bud. He's now started a thing you guys I'm sure will come across called the Nuclear Company, which you'll find in the press these days.

He's been a great resource. And then even a couple of the folks on my executive team there are still day-to-day mentors for me. One of them's name is Blake.

He is like the energy wonk of energy wonks I've ever got to spend some time with. And he's also a hell of a lot of fun. So we have a ton of time together here and there where we're catching up on what each other's doing and keeping each other accountable and motivating each other.

I often too, I think mentorship goes up, down, and across is what I always say. I have a lot of mentors that are younger than me doing different things in different industries that I'm learning a ton from, how they approach different projects, and they're fun ways for me to stay relevant as I age.

I don't know if it applies because it's your home. Are you finding ways to make work more sustainable there?

In terms of environmental sustainability, it's pretty sustainable in that I just walk up the stairs into my office. In terms of my own energy, my personal energy and sustainability of my own hours and practice, you guys can't see it because we're just doing an audio recording, but there's a drum set in here, a bunch of guitars in here, there's a keyboard in here. I lovingly refer to this as my make-shit room, not my office, so when I'm trying to keep myself going and keep myself motivated, I'll often pick up an instrument, noodle around to just get my head clear or myself a little bit of a jolt.

So I've been struggling in how to talk about this in a way that portrays the climate crisis in a compelling and thoughtful way, and not just lectures and finger-wagging, and that can be dismissed. And so how do you approach that when people are challenging you about, if, well, I don't know, in Portland, I'm sure everybody's drunk to Kool-Aid out there, but do you get pushback and how do you deal with that?

I don't know how much pushback I get. And maybe that just means I'm in too much of an echo chamber or something. But I do think there are polarizing ways about talking about the things we're all focused on and trying to solve for.

And that can be a little demoralizing. I think the thing that I experienced the most, though, even in the end, like, let's say we're in the echo chamber of people who do believe the climate crisis is a meaningful crisis to try to solve for. Even in that zone, there are a lot of people who speak about that as if it's the end of the world and everything's terrible and it's all falling apart.

And if we don't do this thing fast enough, we're all going to die and it's sort of a negative outlook on things, even though that they believe that this is a thing we should be solving for. On the other side of that, there's the more optimistic, can-do attitude of if we band together, if we pull people in from other industries who are incredibly smart and help them see that this is a problem space worth trying to attack and be innovative within, then we can probably solve this and it's not going to be that big of a deal if we get our shit together. Those are the people I try to gravitate toward and spend a lot of time with, but both views are useful, I think.

Yeah.

So, be an optimist. I don't know what the takeaway is there, but I think even if we're wrong and we're trying to make world positive technology, even if we're wrong about the climate crisis and it is this political thing and it's a way to be divisive and separate Americans from each other, and we go work on this problem and we make world positive technologies that just make the world even better, then that's great.

Why not?

I'd rather be wrong in that direction than not, you know?

Yes.

Yeah.

And speaking of being wrong, have you made mistakes that you had to get back up from and dust yourself off?

Yeah. I think most of them are like personal life mistakes, but we'll save that for a different podcast. Professionally, I think there are a number of mistakes around leadership that I think I've learned over time, how to more appropriately grow, build, and sort of lead effective teams.

And a lot of that, I think, was mostly ego. As a younger version of myself, was just sort of running headstrong into things and thinking I could pull people with me without having the understanding that I needed to be compassionate and understand each individual's personal situation and lead people differently based on the things that they need and that they're motivated by. Not everyone's going to fit the thing that I want to do the way I want to do it, and it's okay if you don't.

And it's up to me as a good leader to figure out what your motivations are and how to inspire you to solve the problem with me in a way that works for all of us, not just the way that works for me. I made a ton of mistakes in that zone growing up. So I'll leave those people and my exact mistakes out of the list.

Yeah, no, we don't need to get the lawyers involved. So if someone was looking to get into green tech, green career, clean climate, climate action, what kind of advice could you offer them?

There is a ton of research out there these days. And so the first thing I would focus on is sort of like, what are the space in the 60 plus sectors that we started rattling off earlier? There is definitely something that you're going to find you're interested in in any of those.

So don't just generalize climate as climate, and it's this woo-woo thing that one political side is caring about, then another. There are so many different things going on that we can label as climate, and you'll find something you're interested in. Find five or 10 of those types of things you're interested in, and then start talking to people.

LinkedIn is an incredible resource for finding people doing these things. You can search relatively easily, and also, when you send a connection request, you get up to 300 characters to ask someone for their time. So offer to buy coffee, take people to lunch, ask them what they did to get to where they're at, ask them what the company that they're working for is like, learn about the culture and the businesses, ask about the people they're learning from.

The people are the thing that make the thing true, so start there.

Ooh, that's good. I think we found the title of this episode. The people are the thing.

Make the thing real.

Yeah.

It's a word.

I want to add to that. So networking has never been my favorite thing to do until I started pivoting into climate and realizing that one, the response rate is so high. And sorry to use the term, but you can just reach out to someone totally cold, who's doing something cool with your, say, hey, will you do a 15 minute virtual coffee with me?

And I've learned so much. I call it climate dating. I didn't make up that term.

I stole it. I know, but it works for me where you can just reach out. And unlike other industries, it's not transactional.

People are willing to take 15, if they have the time, 15 minutes out of their day, just to talk about what they're doing, because they're just excited about what they're doing. Yep. And want to share.

I actually specifically leave a portion of my schedule open for those types of meetings, because enough people reach out often enough that I'm like, oh, I need to make myself available to this because people are looking for this information, and I want to be supportive of the community and give back in that way. And so oftentimes, too, when folks reach out, I encourage them to meet other people I know in the space, too, which I think you'll find in the climate community is like, oh, you're interested in that. I know this person.

You should talk to them, too. So even that first conversation may lead to two or three others. And you just got to take the first step and be willing to be a little bit uncomfortable and ask for the time.

Do you think that you've changed as a person because of working in climate?

Probably. I don't know if it's specifically because of working in climate. I think the thing that's probably, I don't know.

Maybe I do. The thing that I'm navigating towards in my brain at the moment is like everyone that I've got to spend time with by way of working in climate. There are so many wonderful human beings that I've met along the way that have shaped my learning and development and my view of the world that I've met because of this industry.

But hopefully, they exist in other industries too and I just don't know.

Nope.

Nope. Only climate people are cool people.

You heard it.

Without being specific, just the elephant in the room, are you making a good living?

I am. I'm incredibly fortunate and feel wildly grateful to say that. I'm making more money than I ever have previous to working as a fractional executive.

I have a lot more command of my time, which is the thing I'm most concerned with, is trying to be time rich. And while I said I'm working more hours, it's hours I'm choosing to work on things I choose to work on. It's not hours I got to work because I said I would take this specific job.

Right? And so that feels really wonderful to be able to say. And as I work towards building a family in my personal life, that's something that I'm definitely going to appreciate the flexibility of.

That's great. So purely from a capitalist standpoint, you do okay.

Yeah. You can make a lot of fucking money working in the space. It's not a non-profit.

When you look at energy businesses or infrastructure businesses, a lot of the largest amount of money that moves around the world in the US, but also globally, happens to be in these large, unsexy, massive scale infrastructure companies, which tend to be where a lot of the climate solutions exist.

It's going to take all of us pulling in the same direction.

Definitely. You don't have to be broke to do it.

Yeah, it's just this, I don't know. Like, I'm just trying to push against this sort of, we're all living in trees, man, and just eating twigs and rocks. And like, you know, this is, no, this is what environmentalism looks like.

I actually think the people that I've met that are making the largest impact in this space are capitalists, first and foremost. They are absolutely concerned with the unit economics of how these businesses operate and scale. And they are looking to drive efficiency and reduce OPEX or CAPEX, not always CAPEX, sometimes takes a lot of CAPEX to make these work.

But they are looking to make capital-efficient businesses that make a lot of money. And that happened to also make a lot of impact.

It's like that, I think it was in the Bush administration, John Boehner now owns like a huge string of dispensaries. It's just like, oh, I see the path to making some money now.

Yep. Yep. That's funny.

The last question I'm trying to ask, and kind of in reference to how we started was, if your job were a sitcom, who plays you?

Oh, God. I'm terrible at actors and stuff. I like almost don't watch TV.

That's so Portland, Chris.

I'm not from Portland.

I don't own a TV.

Actually, one of my favorite engineers of all time was up here, like co-working with me for a week, and he left. And when we got on the next meeting, he's like, you know what my takeaway from being in your house is? You guys don't ever turn on the TV.

Weird, right? We only use it to specifically watch something, and then it just gets put away. But yeah, I don't know.

I look like any actor. I often get weird musicians that people think I look like, but not actors.

That I could see.

Even a musician.

I've got Dallas Green a few times, the singer from City in Color, who wears a silly hat and has a big gray beard like I do, so it's an easy analogy. And then there's some country musician that I don't, I don't listen to country music that much, but apparently there's a guy, I think his name's Ratcliffe, Nathaniel Ratcliffe.

Oh, sure. Yeah, I could see that.

Who also is chubby, has a gray beard, and wears a silly hat.

Just trying to sort of vibe check, like how you feel like your day is. Is it, it's a Nathaniel Ratcliffe song, or is it, is it a sitcom? Is it a adventure movie?

You know?

I like adventure movie. Let's go with adventure movie.

Okay.

I think what's fun about my days right now is like, they can go so broad in terms of the types of things I get to learn about, and the people I get to talk to, while also so specific when I'm working on the energy management stuff for marathons. So I can be like, all the way, I always describe it as like bark level detail on the tree, and then zooming back out to view the whole forest like within a single day. And that's often fun.

It's also can be like a lot of energy to get through a day. In some cases where you're like, oh, I got seven back to back 30-minute phone calls after this. Gauntlet, let's go.

So adventure movie.

What's like your send-off message to anyone who is new to or just considering pivoting to climate? What would be your or on the front thinking about it? Do you have some piece of advice or warning, something like that?

No warnings. Get involved. I think the plug maybe is we're doing a lot of really interesting stuff at Marathon.

Even though we're a utility scale Bitcoin mining company, and people often relate Bitcoin mining to energy consumption. We're doing a lot of really very cool, edgy stuff that is renewable energy consumption. And we're constantly growing, we're a public company, and we need awesome talent.

So come look at what we're doing at Marathon. Everything from, I think, just about 60 percent renewable energy mix. We built a data center in Finland that we're taking the heat off the ASICs to heat the city as a sustainable way to create heat for folks in Finland.

We're working on multiple different types of flare gas sites. One's a greenhouse that we're- we have a greenhouse that's kicking off gas that we're using to power Bitcoin miners.

We have a project in Utah that is a landfill, where we're taking the gas off the landfill to power Bitcoin mining facilities, so that's otherwise would just become CO2 in the air. There's a really cool project that we're working with oil refineries on where they generally just like burn off gas into the environment. That's excess capacity for their pipes called flare gas that we're wiring up to generators to run Bitcoin mining machines.

We're looking for all those stranded energy assets and building really cool meaningful projects around stuff that would otherwise be terrible for the world and underutilized to produce Bitcoin. So there's fun, weird edge case stuff going on in our world, and so many others go find companies doing this kind of stuff and get involved.

That's awesome. Well, anything else you wanted to share, or where people can find you, or anything else like that?

Sure. Always up in the chat, reach out if you want to chat about any of this stuff. You can find me on LinkedIn and also Twitter, but more and more rarely on Twitter.

My Twitter handle is rootchris, R-O-O-T-C-H-R-A-S. Ping me. Let's chat.

I'll help you meet people.

Thanks for listening to Team Climate. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. We are not professional podcasters, just passionate about sharing these stories.

So your feedback means a lot as we learn and grow. If you are working in climate action and would like to tell us about it, connect with us at linkedin.com/teamclimate. A big thank you to Brook Pridemore for our music.

Check out more of their work at brookpridemore.com. We'll be back soon with more stories from the climate front lines. Until then, keep taking action, big or small.

It all adds up. See you next time.