Justin Brodie-Kommit: Use what you're best at

Welcome back, Team! Today we're sharing our conversation with Justin Brodie-Commit. Justin is a Climate-Hard-Tech early-stage investor and an avid Climate-Tech community builder. As a founding general partner of Lichen Ventures and a lead organizer for DC Climate Week, He works as a catalyst to drive the mid-Atlantic as a national climate innovation hub while investing across the US. Motivated by a profound concern for vulnerable populations and ecosystems, Justin is committed to making a difference in the face of our climate crisis.

Climate Funders Fireside Chat with Calectra - Decarbonizing Heavy Industry

Baltimore Climate Tech meetup Linkedin

Sign up for DC Climate Week newsletter and throw hat in the ring to volunteer for 2026. 

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 gonna take all of us to change it. My name is Jeffrey Bryan 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 gonna 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.

Hey, welcome back, team. Today we're gonna be talking with Justin Brodie-Kommit. Justin is a climate hard tech early stage investor and an avid climate tech community builder.

As a founding general partner of Lichen Ventures and a lead organizer for DC Climate Week, he works as a catalyst to drive the Mid-Atlantic as a national climate innovation hub while investing across the US. We're glad you're here.

Let's get to work.

We are here with Justin. How are you today?

Hi, Justin.

Hey, Jeff. Hey, Kristen. Doing great.

Thanks for hanging out today.

Awesome. Appreciate your time. I'd love to get started a little bit with what you'd like to tell us about your current work.

Have that as our foundation and we can deviate from there.

Yeah, totally. I'm the managing partner at Lichen Ventures, a Climatech Venture Capital Fund. And I also wear many other hats as well.

I helped to run a few different communities in the Mid-Atlantic region. Two years ago, I started the Baltimore Climatech Meetup Group, and we grew from a dozen people to well over 600 people on our mailing list today. Just had our two-year anniversary with 100 people come through, and it was just so beautiful to watch the community grow and see kind of the synergistic relationships that have come out of it.

I also was one of the lead organizers for DC Climate Week. We had the first one earlier this year, and it was an amazing success. You know, a dozen of us thought it up, and then it grew to a team of 200 volunteers as we helped to build this movement and ecosystem here in the DC area.

We had 4,732 people attend across 152 events, and that was the first year we've ever done it. So really excited for what's to come next year. Wow.

I also run the Climate Funders Community. It's a loosely based group of climate tech venture capitalists, angel investors, family offices, as well as other types of investors in climate in the DMV region and host a bunch of events just to bring amazing people together. And I'm an angel investor in climate tech as well.

Got a lot going on. I'm also a father, yes. I have a one-year-old daughter.

So you sleep one hour a day or two hours? What's the temperature there?

Yeah, my wife has been a rock star. And amazingly, she's been training my daughter for a long time to sleep through the night and eat well. And so luckily, I've been sleeping a little bit more than it sounds like.

Nice. Well, I have never been to a climate week yet. I live in Denver.

I think there's one here. And you start seeing them pop up now more and more. Tell me what goes on there.

Make a case for going to climate week.

I've been to a few climate weeks around the country. My first one was New York Climate Week in 2023, I believe. And it was just a huge catalyst for my career and getting into climate, the networking, really bringing the most amazing people together, working on all of these hard problems was beautiful.

And the learnings I had, highly recommend it. And I went to SF Climate Week last year, and a slightly different flavor of climate week, but still an amazing grouping of people. But I think, you know, DC Climate Week, it was just this beautiful thing that came together.

You know, San Francisco Climate Week is three years old or four years old now. Its first year, they had a hundred events. And so in our first year, we had 152 events in DC.

And so we're somewhat on the same playing ground. But what I really love about these is they're very decentralized, and anyone can host an event, run an event, throw a happy hour on the calendar, and bring together different groups of people that might be interested in a certain topic, as well as are learning of a certain thing. At the DC Climate Week, I ran the Climate Innovation and Technology Day.

We had main programming each day, and we had Bill Nye come in and give a keynote. Oh, no way. Yeah, he brought the house down.

It was epic. And a bunch of other amazing climate tech founders from the region as well as around the country. But we also have had a bunch of other amazing events, whether it's a local dentist that is using climate-friendly practices in their practice, or just a happy hour.

The one night that I had a happy hour at a bar, there was four other happy hours happening simultaneously at the same bar. They were all slightly related and all part of DC Climate Week, so it was a fun gathering.

Start to merge and become one giant happy hour.

Exactly.

That's so much fun. So I'm picturing like a Comic-Con. Kristen's saying, no, that's not the vibe at all.

No, at least the Climate Weeks that I've been a part of, there are a lot of just small venues, a random local law firm or a bookstore, or even a local university gives their space up, and then someone organizes an event there, invites some panelists to join. And so they're typically spread out around these cities, at least in the three examples that I've been a part of. And so in DC, we had a few different geographic hubs, depending on the day and the theme of the day, but overarchingly, they're everywhere.

Like I'm going to New York Climate Week in two weeks from now, and it's across the whole city. And so it's really hard to get around, and you have to optimize your schedule, and they're all kind of disorganized and a mess, but a beautiful mess of just amazing people coming together, all fighting the good fight.

Okay, I have a better picture of it. Nice. Thank you.

I actually saw Bill Nye speak one time at Caltech, and he shut this guy down. It was like so beautiful and so diplomatic. He was just, he's used to doing that kind of stuff.

I'm like, well, another perspective is this, and just lovely.

But Bill Nye is at DC Climate Week. His main takeaway was, do what you both are doing, Jeff and Kristen. Tell your neighbor about some of the amazing solutions that are currently being developed and being scaled in climate tech.

Talk about the problem, the climate crisis, kind of what's going to come from it, and get on the street in March. Get together as a group and spread information, spread hope, but be one voice together.

And spread ideas. That's what I find at the Climate Weeks. Like you, I went to San Francisco and DC, which was rough.

By the end of the DC, when I was like, I can't talk about climate anymore. I'm going home. I was much more invigorated at the DC event.

I was able to speak on a panel, for Terra, I think it was on Wednesday. And it was just, San Francisco felt very big this year. Do you know what I mean?

It felt very big. And still great. I met great people and have been collaborating with them since, but maybe because I'm from this area, but something about the DC one, I left feeling very connected and motivated, and have kept in touch with a couple of people, not on specific projects, but just been able to offer ideas and solutions, make a couple of introductions to get them a couple steps ahead of where they were thinking, and vice versa.

I've gotten some amazing introductions out of it as well. And so it was just really a great, I was just exhausted by the end, I'm not gonna lie. I don't know if you know Radhika, but it was like Wednesday night, just like, are you going to the happy hour?

And she was like, what if we just go to dinner? And we were like, okay, we just went to a very nice dinner.

Yeah, you're a little burnt out. Justin, so you started your career in molecular biology and neuroscience, pivot into climate investing and community building. What motivated that pivot?

Yeah, I've been deeply connected to nature since I was a kid. I grew up in the suburbs of Boston in a pine forest and spent a lot of my time backpacking in the White Mountains. But by the time I was 16, when I saw An Inconvenient Truth, I was like, oh my God, what's going on?

I was getting scared for the reality of the world. And then I started over time to slowly piece together what 5°C, 4°C world meant for vulnerable populations and vulnerable ecosystems. But I always loved biology and really learning how our natural world works.

And so I did my PhD, like you said, in cell molecular biology at Hopkins. But then went down the life sciences biotech rabbit hole after that, working at Genentech. And it was really interesting to develop a novel drug for diabetic macular edema and eye disease.

But at that time, I was kind of coming to almost a crisis. I didn't want to make people healthy on a sick planet. I really saw our climate crisis as this overarching issue I wanted to deal with.

And with the help of my wife, who really helped me to dive deep into myself and see that my soul's purpose is to have a global scale impact on our climate crisis. And I just kept getting drawn after then to these innovative entrepreneurs that were building the solutions we needed across our economy, extremely driven, knowledgeable people. I wanted to find ways to support them.

And I saw, especially at the early stages, these companies oftentimes have a lot of technical risks still inside of them. And the kind of the research and entering new fields that I would do oftentimes in my PhD diving into the primary literature and seeing innovative new technologies and then deploying them in my lab and seeing the power of innovation. I decided that I could use those skills in understanding the technical risk of some of these companies.

Also during my PhD, I built a collaborative team of 18 PhDs around the globe to really help my project get across the line, very cross-functional, cross-disciplinary. And that really amped up the power of my research to allow us to be published in a high-quality journal, Science Advances. And so then I started to do that, looking at these companies as I diligence them, dove into them, asked a lot of people in my network and built my network as I was doing that and just constantly learned from every conversation I had.

I have a follow-up question. Go ahead. So you're drawn to hard tech.

So investors generally shy away from hard tech because the return is slower. Like you said, there's a lot of risk. Commercialization can be much more challenging.

What kind of drew you to that sector specifically?

And before you answer, can we kind of define hard tech a little bit?

Yeah. So I've built up this angel investing portfolio over the last four years, focused almost entirely on climate hard tech. Invested in 86 different companies and it's been just a lot of fun and really a learning journey using my own capital.

But I define hard tech really as anyone building something physical in the real world. A hardware company, a novel industrial process, even using microbes to be the industry of the future. It can also be like a hardware led software, perhaps a sensor type of company.

But through some of the learnings I've done, kind of avoided investing in software only companies. Had a few losses there in my angel portfolio as well. Realized I was not very good at understanding their business model and diligence them.

Sorry, and the... What was the question?

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.

85% 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.

You answered the question, that's all, that's all. We wanted to define hard tech, and then kind of understand why we're drawn in that direction.

Oh, yeah.

I think hard tech, personally, is where the biggest impact can happen. Do you know what I mean? Like those real game-changing things that can, whether it's grid optimization or, I mean, across the board, hard tech, it's just the hardest thing to get over, the finish line.

And so, I'm very happy that you focus on that. And there's a huge team of amazing people working on that.

Yeah, I totally agree. You know, if we look historically, some of the largest exits in venture capital have been hard tech companies or in kind of the whole innovation landscape. And I agree with you.

I think these companies have a higher impact because they're deploying a physical product or a physical chemical or a physical solution in the real world. They also have a larger intellectual property moat. They're built on a foundation of deep science and patents.

And often, you know, their customer contract values are higher as well. So they all need to sell to a lot fewer companies than if you're a SaaS solution, for example. And it's just a lot more fun to go and touch it, feel it, see it, and really help it to scale and grow.

So what would that look like? Like, I'm a company, I figured out a way to turn coffee filters into batteries. And I need to scale up.

How would I, first of all, how would I find you? And then where do we go from there?

So I'll say that a better example, I think, is a company that I really like. That's, I'm a friend with the CEO. It's called Via Separations.

And they've spun out of a lot of deep research in the Boston area. And they sell a membrane technology that can drop into pulp and paper mills. Right now, pulp and paper mills use natural gas to heat up the pulp and paper mixture and evaporate all the water that's part of the process.

Their membrane technology, they electrify it. They fuel switch from natural gas to electricity. And they're saving these pulp and paper mills 20 to 30% on their operational costs annually.

And so, they're paying back in 2.5 to 3 years. And they're not even using climate as a selling factor. They're not saying, oh, we're this climate tech, climate smart solution for you.

They're just using raw economics. And they're doing amazing. They're scaling, they're deploying.

They're starting out in pulp and paper, but then this membrane technology is applicable to a lot of other industrial processes. And so those are, that's like a kind of company that I really love seeing. And they're scaling with revenue and really growing through deploying their products.

And just this great example that I think right now, companies that have unit economics that work, that don't need to monetize their climate benefit, are having a great time and being deployed across the economy. As far as how to find me or can participate with me, I'm on LinkedIn, I go to these Climate Weeks, I run a lot of events in the DC area. I'm happy to talk to a lot of companies that are based here as well as across the country.

But a lot of this is done, I can only do so much as an individual angel investor through my fund. A lot of this is done in a large collaboration, through a lot of different funders, through accelerators and incubators around the country. And I'm helping to partner with some of them, mentor their companies and be a part of it there as well.

We touched on this just before we started recording. There is this perception that the funding's dried up with our current politics, like the EPA is gone, that all the things, no jobs, no money. And you're finding that isn't the case.

Yeah, there's $84 billion currently earmarked for climate, kind of, across the climate capital stack, from the early stage of venture and growth equity funding, to private equity and infrastructure capital. And the clock's ticking on that, you know, that stack of dry powder, as it's called, has been slowly growing over the years. And I think there's a lot of hesitancy to invest, kind of, around Trump coming into power and kind of all the changes that have been happening in the time since then.

But I've seen a lot of investments begin to really take off again. And really excited for the direction that's heading. And we're seeing, you know, perhaps the Department of Energy's priorities are shifting.

But there's other agencies within the government that are picking that up. If you're in renewable energy or transportation, you know, you've historically seen gotten 65% of climate tech investments over the last few decades. But you're only 35% of emissions.

These other verticals that I've been really excited about in my investing journey, I'm seeing being picked up and getting a lot of attention these days. For example, tapping into my cell molecular biology PhD, always really impressed by the power of biology and really turning biology into an engineering discipline. And so I've invested in companies that turn microbes into the industry of the future.

And it's called biomanufacturing or industrial biotechnology. We're seeing the Department of Defense spending a billion dollars to help scale up this whole industry. They've already allocated over 300 million in the first three of their scale up infrastructure sites around the country to support innovative startups in that space, as well as directly supporting startups through grants.

We're also, you know, even with the previous administration and this administration, seen a big bipartisan push to boost critical mineral manufacturing, production, processing. And just recently, there was a billion dollars announcement there to support the critical minerals industry. And we're so we're seeing a lot kind of across this, even though times are tough for some verticals, certainly in climate tech, but I think there's still a lot of companies, even in those verticals, that no longer get as much federal attention or federal investment just due to the business cases they open up.

Are you seeing patterns of what has been really successful?

I've been, you know, slowly growing my own personal investment thesis as an angel investor over these past four years and seeing thousands of companies and trying to build up some sort of pattern recognition and understand the types of companies that I want to continue to invest in. And yeah, so what I'm seeing as successful is really focusing on Neutron Economics, where these companies that are, yes, they're climate tech and they're reducing pollution, they're reducing fossil fuel use, petroleum, oftentimes using some sort of bio-based method, but they're saving these customers money. And I think that's right now the strongest way to really deploy into the market and grow sustainably.

I believe that the companies that make it through these next three to four years are going to be extremely well positioned. They might have to be a little scrappier now, certainly, and make sure they really have their product market fit down and understand what their customer needs. But I see the industry and the sector growing quite a lot.

In a way, it's like any trend. The Internet was just soaking up everybody that had a.com, and that bubble burst, and then it funneled the successful people through, and the people who adapted to mobile, and the people who adapted to COVID, they survived and were better for it. That's interesting to learn about.

And we saw the same thing in climate. Climate was really hot in the 2021, 2022, and there was a lot of investment coming into the space from what many people have called kind of tourist investors, hyping up the space, bringing capital, and which has been wonderful, but maybe not being as aligned on the technical front of what makes a good company, or really even being able to support them in the future once, if they hit hard times. And I think the investors that are left really understand what has been working, and they saw the boom and the bust of Cleantech 1.0, and there's a lot of lessons learned there for sure.

And I think we're entering this Climate Tech 3.0 almost, but really excited to get into it.

If somebody came to you with an idea for a startup, what kind of advice might you offer them?

Yeah, I would offer them, it kind of depends on the stage of the company. I think there's a lot of amazing incubators and accelerators around the country that they can join, like Activate. For example, and or SOSV hacks and IndieBio have been great ones as well.

I would advise them to really dive into their customers and understand what their customers need and have a lot of those customer discovery conversations and try to get letters of intent, memorandums of understanding, paid pilots, understand what it takes to get material into customers' hands to get them to evaluate it. I was briefly a co-founder of a battery materials company. We turned CO2 into battery-grade graphite, and it was a lot of fun and a great journey, but we were right at that phase of going from my co-founder's garage and making grams of sample to try to scale up to get our graphite into battery makers' hands.

And it's certainly a tricky phase in getting those agreements in place, but they can be extremely catalytic to the funding.

Yeah, that must be odd conversations. Jumping into your community-building work, why do you see that as such a critical piece of the transition?

I think people in climate in general are extremely generous and giving and all very aligned in so many ways. In the past four and a half years of my transition into climate, I've really learned from almost every conversation I've had with people, whether they're virtual, in person, in a larger format, panels, podcasts like yours. And so I was trying to find a way to bring people together, to learn from each other, and grow their own network, and then also see amazing overlaps for collaboration and learnings and peer support.

So with the Baltimore Climate Tech Meetup, it's been so beautiful to just see that happen. And me and my friend Nate, we met on the My Climate Journey Slack, and we're like, oh, we want to hang out with some other people doing climate tech stuff locally. And at that time, I was driving into DC every month to go to the Climate DC Meetups, which are wonderful, and still have over 100 people join them each month.

But I didn't want to have to go out of my way and network with people outside of the Baltimore where I lived, and want to find a way to really boost the ecosystem here. So we just started hanging out at a local brewery and talking about turning gas stations into battery hubs and EV charger and virtual power plants, or finding new ways to do oyster farming that's more sustainable and increase productivity or make drones as well. And it's just grown.

We've had people find co-founders in the group, find investments in the group, into their companies. But also just a founder of a company that's been doing it for a year or two, talking to someone who's about to start a company and learning from them, getting the best lessons learned there, or finding other people to connect with, finding possible customers, and I think just bringing very like-minded, amazing people together. While it's been so heartwarming for me to see, I think I've heard a lot of good reviews that people keep coming back and they get a lot out of it.

Can you think of an example? A connection you made that extrapolated out to bigger picture climate impact?

Through the Baltimore Climate Tech Meetups, one of my friends there, Justin, runs Good Idea Solar, and he comes from a farming background. And so he can talk to farmers where they're at and helps them to put solar panels onto their farms at a pretty small scale. And through the Meetups, Justin met one of my friends, JP Moscarella, who has just been in this amazing guy, who's been in climate for the last 35 years

I worked with him at Resilient Earth Capital, an angel investing group here that I helped to run for the last year and a quarter before I started Lichen Ventures. And JP joined Justin on his advisory board and really helped him to grow his business and find some capital to really deploy more projects through his company. Another example is Patrick Ho, who runs Forager Station.

They're isolating lithium from underground resources that are currently being thrown out on a daily basis today, tapping into a multi-billion dollar market of lithium that's being thrown out. He has a few hundred million in interest from these produced water providers. And through just networking at my meetups, he found his CTO.

And they've been growing the business together, trying to deploy their pilot system. And so it's just cool. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

And I met Kristin there. So that's been the most, the best connection so far.

I found you. So I actually moved back to, I was home for the holidays before I moved back to Maryland. And I went to an event for another organization.

I think it was MCIEC. It was one of the Energy Accelerator Groups. And so I'm new and I'm like, so I'm trying, I moved from Florida.

I pivoted into climate, but in Florida, I had no in-person climate community. And that was starting, it was making me feel sad if I'm being honest. And so I had a great online and virtual community that I had built up, but I wanted to be able to go have dinner, grab drinks or just, I wanted that in-person community.

So that was my goal at that event. I was like, so what's going on here? Who does stuff?

What's happening? And three different people were like, follow Justin, follow Justin, follow Justin. So I got home and I followed you.

And then the meetings just started popping up, and I've built out a pretty decent community here in less than a year. So thank you.

Thank you for joining and being a part of it.

Like find your people, right? Yeah. What I would love to talk about is the breadth in which people can contribute, whether it's at a 95 job or like we're saying, in communities and things.

And so, can you talk a little bit about the type of people you work with or that you have met that's just like the gamut of possibilities out there?

I think like for roles, like for me, I'm not a climate scientist. And anyway, I'm a marketer through and through, have an MBA, you know, I'm passionate about this though, like over a large, I don't want to become a climate scientist. You know, I want to do marketing comms.

I want to be able to like influence the masses as we do. And so I would also expand on what Jeff said, like, you know, past your very scientific background and skillset, who do you come across and what opportunities are out there for that?

Yeah, you know, I'm a deep believer that we need everyone in every company, every job, every sector to really lean into our transition, our climate positive transition and use sustainability. I love that people, you know, when I talk to young people coming out of school that want to be a part of climate, I just tell them to lean into what they're passionate about and bring climate into that, whether they're, they want to do investigative journalism, they want to do business development, they want to get an MBA and help scale these companies, or they want to come out of the lab and be a scientist at a climate tech startup. I think there's so many opportunities really across our economy for anyone to really use what they're best at and apply that.

I think that one way to figure out the best way to tap in is through these communities and finding your local ecosystem of people working in climate tech or climate advocacy. But also, if you have the resources to, I've gotten a lot of value out of Angel Investing and helping to support these young early startups that are in their precede seed or kind of building out, spinning out of a university, spinning out of a local climate accelerator. We have the Maryland Energy Innovation Accelerator here locally that really sees a lot of the climate tech companies.

And they're also constantly hiring for entrepreneurs and residents for late career C suites or people that have corporate innovation development or know this one vertical really well. And so there's a lot of opportunities to join and mentor early stage companies, invest in early stage companies and support the ecosystem or even just bring climate into your everyday job. In the last four years, I've joined a bunch of different climate angel investment syndicates and really used them as a learning tool to understand a lot of different sectors in the field and build community.

And I highly recommend it for people that are interested in getting into that. You get to interact with founders, understand the diligence process and really grow your knowledge base there. And in the angel investing communities I've been a part of, there's this wide breadth of people from outside climate for their whole career, but want to be a part of this climate tech future that we all know is possible.

Or people that have been in climate tech for their whole career. But yeah, I just I feel honored to have built this job where I get to hang out with the most amazing people every day, whether they're founders building the future or people trying to support them in many different ways, and finding my own ways to support them as well.

Is there anything you can think of that you had to unlearn, moving from the private sector, corporate world, academics into what you do now?

When I was at the bench, when I was a bench scientist, I was constantly just trying to solve problems, come up with hypotheses, prove them, and slowly advance the science. And it was a lot of fun. And working as a basic scientist, you're constantly trying to grow the knowledge of the field.

But for unlearning, there's a lot of science projects that I think are not ready yet to become businesses and scale through the venture capital funding model, at least. And there's other funding vehicles for that, whether they're federal or philanthropic or foundations. But I've had to unlearn my love of these science experiments or really early stage knowledge gathering and focus more on the technologies that are really ready to scale and grow and be catalyzed by some of the funding that I would be being a part of.

Have you had the opportunity to do some mentoring in some of these communities?

Yeah, I've been, I've mentored a small handful of climate tech startups and just joined the New York Climate Exchange as a mentor as well. And so excited to dive in there. They're launching something beautiful on Governor's Island.

What's your favorite part?

My favorite part is just hanging out with these founders and supporting them. They continue to inspire me and show me the beautiful future that's possible. And as we stop polluting our air, our water, our bodies, and seeing the really innovative solutions that they've built and the business models have built to do that.

And they're just rock stars and superstars. I am constantly impressed by their drive, their knowledge, their ability, and just trying to find ways to support them with capital and beyond.

And as if you needed more inspiration, you just became a dad. As this changed you, has this influenced your perspective?

Yeah, it's always been kind of abstract, seeing as we headed towards a four-degree Celsius world where I was leaving biotech and now maybe a three-degree Celsius world, understanding that it's affecting all of us around the globe. But now thinking about my daughter Lyra and her future has really brought it home to me in a way that I can't do anything else but this for the rest of my career. I came out of paternity leave and immediately started fundraising for Lichen Ventures.

I realized that early stage investing is my way of having an impact in this world, whether as an angel investor or through my venture capital fund and supporting these companies as they grow on their trajectory, because they're going to build the future that I want my daughter to grow up in, and I want her generation and her kids to grow up in and be a part of. And it's just really brought it home to me every time I see her smile and get to hold her and hang out with her. It's been a beautiful, crazy, hectic journey of being a dad and having a family now.

But it's endlessly motivating at the same time.

Can you think of any advice that you received, that you really think about all the time and took to heart?

Yeah, one of my mentors and friends, JP Mascarella's favorite tagline is just, everybody needs more friends in climate. And so I'm trying to do that through my community building and through the networking and trying to help connect amazing people together as well.

In your investing effort, do you set goals for the year, goals for the six months? Is that relevant in this world?

Not that I want to talk about, I guess. But the goals I am set are how many events to have and really trying to level up and bring more amazing people together. We have monthly events through the Baltimore Climatech Meetup, whether they're happy hours or the quarterly lightning talks where we bring founders and give them a chance to present their work and share their knowledge in front of the community or the events I'm hosting in the DC area.

We just had one last week bringing together someone who's making rare earth mineral free EV motors, a local fusion company using a linear accelerator and a local biomanufacturing company taking food waste and turning it into these high value chemicals, as well as a few funders from S2G Ventures, Sandy Spring Climate Partners and Construct Capital. And that was amazing. We had the capital building as a backdrop through the window, and it was a lot of fun.

Oh, nice. And just trying to find more ways to build events to keep the momentum going from DC Climate Week and keep spreading the gospel that Climatech is here. It's here to stay and it's growing rapidly.

And whether or not you see something bad on the news or Trump tweets something crazy, there are founders working every day to build these companies and grow them and change our whole economy. And so my goals are really just to keep bringing people together and showing examples of what's happening in a beautiful way.

Nice. I love that.

I want to add a point. So, Nia, I would like to also frame that. So we, the people that like to listen to us are people that like me, are kind of curious or interested in want to understand what working in climate would look like if it, you know, if they have the transferable skills, whatever.

And I think it's important to mention that these start-ups that you're working with are the job creators of next year or six months from now or, you know, it's a transition to the economy, but it's also building out opportunity for people beyond the founders themselves and beyond the investors. So, yeah, I just want to, it's not a question. I just wanted to put that out there to say, you know, this is where the jobs come from.

This is where they start. This is where the jobs were a year before that listing popped up. So I think it's very important work that you're doing.

So thank you.

Yeah, I agree with you. Whether it's Biden's way of onshore manufacturing or Trump's way of onshore manufacturing, I think the companies that we're launching and growing in this country all need to be a little bit more climate friendly than the ones they're replacing from China. For example, rare earth mineral processing in China.

It's like an acre hell site of chemicals and pollution and we're seeing Phoenix-Tailing doing that in New Hampshire without interacting with their environment in a negative way at all and making domestic rare earth minerals through innovation that was built up over the last few years. And so I agree with you. These startups are bringing jobs here and bringing manufacturing home and they all need someone working in operations and sales and marketing in everything that almost every company needs.

Someone working on supply chain and logistics. And so I think there's really an opportunity for everybody to find their climate job.

That's so cool. Does the negativity reach you, the deniers and things like that? And how do you react to that?

You know, I don't see the climate deniers reaching me at all. It's more the people that are actively trying to manipulate our economy, our political system to suppress this transition or deny it at the federal level. What gives me pause there and really optimism is constantly learning about these solutions, like through the Voltz podcast, the Catalyst podcast, your podcast, and these other founders that I meet and get to see what they're building.

I think the future, it's inevitable. I think this is one of the largest problems to overcome of our lifetime, but I think it's also one of the largest opportunities in that way. And yeah, every day I wake up and kiss my daughter and just think about her and her future and her love and my wife's love drive me to try to keep making this positive change.

That's a great. I'm glad you brought up podcasts and such, self-interest, but other things that are keeping you inspired, books, movies, whatever.

Yeah, I really like Don't Look Up.

That's great.

Yeah, that's a great movie. Yeah, I read Heatmap News a lot just to understand what's going on and love the podcast that I mentioned. And I think there's been a big groundswell of amazing climate podcasts to keep showing that this is happening on a daily basis across our economy.

And yeah, I've come to a Baltimore Climatech Muta for Climate Funders event to see some of this, to hear more of this gospel in person.

Nice. One more, this is sort of a silly question, but if your life were a sitcom, who would play you?

Yeah, I keep thinking in some regards, I feel like Captain Planet. Bring in together a bunch of impactful, amazing people, but also different sectors that I've invested in as an angel, like biomanufacturing and adaptation resilience and industrial decarbonization and kind of seeing them come together as this beautiful climate fight and fight against these polluters and kind of the old legacy industry.

That one girl with the purple hair down in front of her face, yeah, she was the worst. That's a great place to end it, unless you had anything else you wanted to mention.

Just wanted to thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun to talk with you and just excited for the future of Climatech and would love to be a resource to others going forward.

Justin, thank you for your time and keep doing what you're doing. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

Bye. 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 Brookprydmore for our music. Check out more of their work at brookprydmore.com. We'll be back soon with more stories from the Climate Frontlines.

Until then, keep taking action, big or small. It all adds up. See you next time.