Jennie Montano: We're Going to See Some Really Cool Sh*t

In this episode, we talk with Jennie Montano, an operations and supply chain leader who has spent her career simplifying complex systems, reducing waste, and helping companies work smarter. Jennie shares how her experience in biotech and global supply chain translates directly to climate solutions, from cutting inefficiencies to accelerating commercialization for hard tech startups.

We also explore her passion for home electrification and heat pumps, including insights from her ClimateDrift article on making your home a climate champion. Jennie explains why installation rather than technology is the real barrier and how homeowners can make their homes more efficient. She also offers grounded advice for anyone looking to pivot into climate work and explains why narrowing your niche is the key to effective networking.

Plus, she wanted us to know that her sitcom casting choice would be Jenna Fischer as Pam from The Office.

This is our final episode of 2025. We will be back in 2026 with season 2. Let's get to work!

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.

Welcome back, team. Today, we're happy to bring you our conversation with Jennie Montano, an operations and supply chain leader with a deep commitment to climate innovation. Jennie is also a contributor to the ClimateDrift sub stack and wanted to let us know that her sitcom casting choice would be Jenna Fischer.

Pam from The Office, you'll understand what that means at the end. This will be our last episode for 2025, but we're gonna be back for season two in January. Until then, let's get to work.

Jennie, how are you today?

I'm good, how are you both doing?

Good, good. It's been a long, long couple of days. A little tired out.

But Jennie, can you start with your journey from engineering into more operations and supply chain? How you got your start?

Sure, I've always been, I've done a lot of different roles throughout my careers. I've been in real estate development, I've been in finance, I've been in banking. And then at the end of the day, I was always trying to become an engineer.

And I did at some point decide to go back and get my master's in electrical engineering. And then I got done with that degree and wanted to go back into finance. So I did that for a little bit.

And then after two years, just kind of realized that I wanted something technical. I wanted that technical challenge. So I ended up getting a temporary role at Genentech, a biotech company.

I was in their engineering group. So for the first time in my life, I was actually doing engineering work. But I was also like there to kind of be an operations person.

They're transforming their quality procedures in their engineering manufacturing sites. So that was like this two-year project I came for. And I just realized with that role, everything I ever done came with this, the through line through all of them was this real corny desire to make things simpler, right?

To ease operations, make things repeatable. And ideally, I always came to work with this mindset that if I dropped off the face of the earth, somebody could still do my job, because I left all the instructions there. So, you know, I never felt a need to be so protective of my work that no one knew how to do it.

I wanted everybody to know how to do it. So that's where I've come into the operations, and I've grown since I started in biotech. I was in engineering for about four years, and then I shifted in supply chain and realized that still I was doing that, like, simplify the work, make it effortless, make it automatic, make it as stupid as possible, honestly, so you could minimize mistakes, especially when you're trying to get medicine to people that are enduring really awful physical disease problems.

So, yeah, that's kind of been the thread of my experience in my career.

And so, why supply chain? What made you realize like that had some major levers for climate action?

You know, it's just when you're doing supply chain, you're trying to automate as much as possible, and you're also trying to reduce waste. You want to eliminate too many steps. You also want to eliminate.

There's a fine line between over-supplying clinical trials and under-supplying. You want to find ways that, especially in clinical trial design, you can come to the very last, like you can start coming to manufacturing, and suddenly your trial doesn't meet their endpoints, and everything you've created can't be used, because it's just not, it's not going to be feasible. It's not going to work for the patients.

So, I was on a device project for Genentech, and it was, I was part of a team that was creating a platform so that we could just, if one of our trials got canceled, we could move all that material to another trial, except for the drug product, but we can, we could move all the components to a different clinical trial. So you're, you didn't have to waste anything. You could reuse it.

And when I thought about that, about going into climate tech, I was like, is not circularity so much as just, how do you, in all these big companies that were trying to, you know, come up with solutions for climate, how can we make supply chain as effortless as possible? How can we make sure we're not creating additional waste? And sure, if we come to a point, like we are with batteries, that we can make them more circular, then let's do that.

Let's make our design as circular as possible.

That's a good example of batteries. What other really big opportunities do you see?

Well, you know, with all these changes to international tariffs, I mean, that becomes a big thing, too. We were already starting with the Inflation Reduction Act. We were already starting to move towards more manufacturing within the US.

You know, those of us who have been in the industry for a long time thought that offshoring was a stupid idea to begin with because we were losing all our intellectual talent. But, you know, it was profit over people, profit over IP. And so bringing that back in is a huge challenge, right?

Bringing that supply chain back to the US is even more important now that we've had these terrors put in place. We've become a global economy. And when you're in supply chain for biologics or pharmaceuticals, you're dealing with every country in the world.

So you know how those tariffs are impacting the supply chain. And if Green Tech is, you know, if it's a new Green Tech company, they may not have that experience in pharmaceutical supply chain. You can bring that in.

You can help them with those problems and help them identify areas that they could reduce their risk for tariff exposure.

I think it's interesting when you say, you know, just trying to produce less waste in the supply chain process, I think that goes back to the high level premise of climate change. The reality is we use, I don't remember where I read this, but it was like we are currently using the resources of an earth and a half to maintain the current population, you know? And so reducing things like within the supply chain or wherever we can reduce, and I'm a big fan of circularity, it's kind of the whole premise, right?

Like we, if we could just use less of the resources without going without, right? Like we don't, we as individuals or consumers or, or patients in, in your case, that's a huge solve to the overall problem. We don't have to use this insane, like literally one and a half times the amount of resources that are available to us.

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a big thing too, right? It's just trying to be as efficient as possible with the material you have.

And I think that's a really interesting take on, on climate solutions, because we've talked to a lot of people and I'm guilty of this a lot. Like we think about the big picture and the theory and like the overarching scope. But the reality to actually achieving this is, is doing what you're talking about, like going in, making changes to an organization because reducing waste to the supply chain doesn't just have an environmental impact.

That's a cost savings, right? Like now you've got the economic benefit. So it's like that dual, the dual benefit and that's what drives most of these startups, most of these clean tech startups to be successful.

Just having a great idea to reduce carbon emissions or whatever isn't going to get investment. It isn't going to get funding. It's not going to get the recognition.

But if you can tie it between an economically positive business model, it's a game changer for these technologies.

Yeah, for sure. And business operations process improvement is also about giving your employees more time back too. So it's that kind of making them, especially if you're a smaller startup, you want your employees to be working as effectively as possible and not just spinning a hamster wheel, trying to do the same thing over and over again.

Yeah, or your investors will also be happy if you don't, if you can reduce your burn rate.

Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Jennie, do you, I wonder if you could walk us through a specific project you've been involved with, where you applied this kind of thinking, and maybe kind of tell us that story.

Yeah, I've been through a lot of these, like it's kind of going back to the Toyota technology, Six Sigma, you know, doing a Kanban, where you're taking the whole group and walking through the end-to-end business process, trying to understand exactly how many emails and how many like manual handoffs you have to do to make a project happen, you know? And then also going to the manufacturing site and helping your engineer, your internal engineers understand like how manual, an automated pre-filled syringe line actually is. So yeah, with the clinical packaging at Genentech, it was like a huge team of people from the global supply chain just walking through kind of, everybody walked through their day to day of how to get an order, a physical order for drug for a finished good.

From the very beginning, like making labels, creating master data for it, all the way through to handing it off to a group like the one I was part of called CMO Management, handing that forecast off to us, and then us giving it to the manufacturing side to have it packaged. And then the steps after that for our distribution team to send it to a clinical site. There were so many things that we were doing manually that at the end of that project, we were able to reduce our clinical timelines by two weeks.

Just to kind of eliminate some, to automate, we were able to automate things. And eventually, we used to have to wait for the finished good package to be fully released by our quality team before it could ship to a clinical site. But, you know, maybe a year and a half later, our quality team was so self-assured by the automation of our system, our ERP system, that they took another two weeks off our shipping timeline by being able to just automatically ship everything at risk and release it at the depot later.

So, you know, just having these conversations, you start to instill trust in your kind of upstream and downstream groups that can compress your timelines, which in supply chain can be huge, right? And then from a manufacturing perspective, like I said, there was, we were using an automated pre-filled syringe line and everybody just thought it was like a super fast process. And just being able to bring people to the site and show them, like the company I work for, Genentech, required a 200% inspection.

So it turned out we were doing like a 600% inspection because we had, we had three 200% inspections at different points within the process. So just highlighting that is like, you know, this is what's happening. We were able to reduce our timelines and our costs there by like 12%.

It sounds like you're making a case that there's a lot more similar in climate work with non-climate work than there are differences.

Yeah, for sure. We all do it. We all like make up our own processes or, you know, think we're eliminating risk by having three people check the same document or, yeah, just like overdoing it sometimes and having those conversations about, and walking through the process and throwing those sticky notes up on a wall when you're doing a value stream mapping just helps people really understand, like, how much extra work they're doing that may have very little value.

I think especially valuable in hard tech, like climate tech, hard tech, I think is where the most impact is going to be. Like those innovations, those solutions are where we're going to have like the largest portions of impact on climate change. And I don't work in hard tech, right?

I come from tech, I come from SaaS, I'm definitely on the soft side of technology. And the perception on the other side is like, hard tech takes so long. Do you know what I mean?

And like people really like the talent and the people and the investors and the money shine away from it just because of like the time to develop and then once develop the time to market. And so that overall process of commercialization is, I think, one of the biggest barriers to us getting some of these really impactful solutions in market. I don't have a question here.

I'm just calling out the statement. I think having your point of view and your skillset applied to any of the hard tech projects I've seen not only would help get commercialized and faster, but again, would probably get them invested faster. I think they struggle sometimes just even being able to communicate their supply chain process outside of the people who are the experts in it.

Yeah. I think a lot of people can't fathom the level of scrutiny there are from a regulatory perspective. There, you know, you have to manufacture to certain specs, and then those have to be validated and qualified.

I used to make this joke all the time in clinical packaging. It's like people always seem to think I just had a printer at my desk so I could just print off labels and slap them on the product and send them out. And it's, it's, there's a lot more that goes into it.

So it's, I think you have to bring people up to speed on all the steps that have value. And you know, and that's, that's another thing, like doing a value stream mapping, like showing how each person participates in the step to bring the hard tech to reality. You can help people visualize that these are all the steps that are needed.

And you can, you could point, there are many times where you can pinpoint, like, okay, that's kind of overdoing it. Like, what are the risks? Like, why is that there?

How many times have we experienced that risk? And if you only experienced it once, like 10 years ago, then do we really need to still have it, that check in there? You know, if we've performed this, this many times, then we can get rid of that check and we can streamline our process a little bit more.

Does that ever bite you in the end? Like, we can cut this, we can cut that. And does that ever come back and say, and you go, oh, we shouldn't have cut that?

I think very rarely, because you have the awareness of it. If anything, what happens more is that you have some, like, random risk you never thought would come up. And then again, you kind of put a check in place and say, okay, how many times can we get through this without experiencing it again?

And if we experience it again, okay, we have to keep that in place. That has to be there. Supply chain and manufacturing always have to kind of do these annual risk reviews where you're assessing that, like, okay, we identified this as a high risk, but it hasn't happened in this many runs.

So can we downgrade that?

So you are very interested in heat pumps.

Yeah.

So I don't know that much about heat pumps. I know that they're great. I know we should all get them.

I know that there's a lot of positive impact to it. But tell us a little bit about how your experience kind of led you to your interest in heat pumps and how your, I want to say philosophy, but it's not a philosophy. Your expertise in the supply chain model, like how does that apply to the heat pump sector?

Yeah. I mean, I'd say that for me, my epiphany came when I lived in Hawaii, and I didn't really realize until last year when I was writing about my existing house in Texas, how well electrified that house in Hawaii was. All I know is I was inspired by an article talking about how they had created a biosphere to simulate, to help astronauts simulate life on Mars or the Moon.

And that made me realize like, why can't we make all our houses this self-contained biosphere? I put it aside for about four years because I was very busy with my work. But then finally in 2024, I said, this is like to me, that's still this problem I've been thinking about for four years.

I want to learn about it and I want to learn how we can solve it. So that led to me writing my article. It led me eventually to the ClimateDrift Accelerator.

And from that, I wrote an article about how to make your house a climate champion. Just trying to understand how I could make my home as self-contained as possible. And from there, I just realized that that really excited me.

Like I can't wait to electrify my home as much as possible. Unfortunately, I installed a bunch of new systems just five years ago, because it's going to be a while. I think what's come down to it for me for heat pumps is that is really like the fastest and most impactful way you can make a change to your house after you assess kind of the air stealing in your house.

I just finished the rewiring America electrification coach program. And that's really what they focus on. Like, how can you make your home less leaky, you know, either releasing cold or hot air?

And then, you know, how can you help people understand, like, what kind of heat pumps they need to put in their house? So that to me is the most exciting. Like, and if I could get into Mitsubishi or some of the one of the other big heat pump manufacturers, that would be super exciting to be in their supply chain or manufacturing.

I'm a marketer and I think heat pumps are great. But before I went through the Tera program, I did not think they were good. I think heat pumps have a branding problem.

I think they have a misunderstanding that they don't work that well, and they're not very good. And so for colder climates, they're not actually going to heat your house. Like, can you dispel some of those myths?

Yeah, I mean, that was part of the Rewiring America coaching certification program, is to help you kind of combat those myths. You know, there are cold climate heat pumps that are really efficient, that it's really become an installation problem more than a mechanical problem, because too many HVAC installers are installing with the old way, which the traditional furnace slash AC system just blow as much power into the house as you can, you know, so it doesn't really matter. But the problem with heat pumps, or I wouldn't say problem, but the heat pumps need a little bit more finesse.

They need to be installed to handle the right cooling load for your house. So you have to do a little bit better calculation on the cooling load that you need, and kind of design it to like the average temperature that you're going to experience in your climate zone. And when you do that and you have a very knowledgeable installer, it's going to be amazing for your house.

It's also another myth that I just learned about heat pumps, is with our existing furnaces and AC, we're used to turning it on and feeling this huge blow of cool air or hot air. So we have this perception that we're getting warm and we're cooling off, but heat pumps are more subtle than that. They're just exchanging air within the room and changing the temperature with less of an exertion.

They're more suave, I guess you can say. So we're all used to that big, powerful system and when it doesn't do that, we think it's not performing. So it's just educating ourselves about, we want something quieter, more subtle.

I'm pretty uneducated. I know it's the right thing to do, but it sits in each room in your home or it replaces your furnace? Or how does that work?

Only if you do a split system. So if you have an existing ducted system in your house, you can replace that with a heat pump that's also ducted. And it can perform just like your, it can go through the same vents, like probably, and this is something I keep meaning to verify after the coaching program, but probably your venting system wasn't installed very well because your whole system is set up to just like blow a ton of hot or cold air.

So I've been meaning to look at my ductwork upstairs and see if it was actually designed well, or if it's just kind of all over, drooping all over the place.

Designed well, do you mean like evenly distributed throughout? Is that what that means? Like what does designed well mean?

Yeah, like in most cases, when we're doing the program, they're talking about like rigid heat duct systems, or if it was flexible, it shouldn't just be like drooping over other equipment or over like they showed pictures of it, like a flexible tube, kind of just drooping over a beam in somebody's attic, and then compressed in such a way that probably the air is getting pinched in it a little bit. So if you're using a flexible tube, it really should just be because you're trying to get around a small space, but it should still be open and open enough to get the heat, the air flow through instead of being impeded. So I have this vague sense that I remember some of my ductwork kind of just draping over something.

But that could have been the old ductwork, I'm not sure.

When I bought this house, it was, I bought it in the spring and didn't think to use, you know, try the heater and then became November, you know, and I'm like, oh, I better turn this heater on, like, oh, let's turn it up, let's turn it up, let's turn it up. It was like, I had it set at like 80 degrees, and it was just like, kind of, I'm still wearing sweaters and stuff in the house. And it turned out they hadn't connected the furnace to the ductwork inside the basement.

So it was just this boiler room inside the little closet where the furnace was, but it wasn't reaching the house.

So you just had all the heat in one room.

Yeah. Oh my God. It was the worst.

Yeah. So like, as an example of how that could be poorly designed, you know, but-

Isn't that crazy that that didn't show up in inspection?

Oh my God. And the furnace was like for an office building. Like it was way too big, shoved in there and then not connected to the house.

Like, oh, I'm a mess. But so I think you answered this. I think heat pumps.

But what other frontiers, if money were no object, you know, would you maybe want to get into and work in, like in the next, you know, that are coming up in the next five years?

You know, honestly, I love all the people I'm connected to that are trying to make heat pumps a reality in their communities. You know, and they're so they're, they're not HVAC installers. One of them's a rocket scientist.

As a matter of fact, and, you know, and they're just finding the, they're finding the right talent, and then they're becoming the program managers to kind of get people to adopt heat pumps. And they're helping people every step of the way. So those are the people that I find inspiring.

And I'd love to just start knocking on my neighbor's doors and say, you know, what do you think about replacing your AC? Can I use your experiment? You know, if money was no object, then I'd want to start converting as many as my neighbors as possible.

To that point, my neighbor has a very loud AC. I was sure that I was about to die. It sounded, it was so loud that I thought it was on his last legs.

And he texted me out of the blue one day asking, you know, who my age fat guy was. And I got so excited because I thought it was time to replace it. It turned out it's only eight years old, and it just needed some maintenance.

But yeah, you know, it's just, if money was no object, I'd just start converting people to eat bombs as fast as I could.

That'd be like a Robin Hood, you know. She wanders the landscape getting everyone heat pumps.

Yeah, I think it was Elephant Energy might have posted a video about like how quiet heat pumps are. And that was like, oh, silence.

Yes.

How can we reduce noise?

So I was telling that story about my furnace. I had to get a, replace the whole furnace. It was about 2,500 bucks.

Where does a heat pump stack up for something like that? So I have a one bedroom townhouse.

Yeah, I mean, I haven't gotten that deep into the details of it. I did actually know that was a heat pump water heater that was trying to convince my friend to install. And that I feel like was in the 5,000 range.

I've been told in Toronto, Canada, by Tessa Peerless who's doing heat pump installations, that they've got their baseline is around, I think it's less than $8,000 per installation. And that's before any of the rebates or anything.

And then you start to see that pay for itself because your heating and your electric bill goes way down?

Your electric bill might go up a little higher. You'd get rid of the gas, but it would definitely be more efficient. You know, overall, you could have the settings lower.

What do they say that is? I want to say that it's like 70 percent more efficient. Okay.

Than a furnace. So over time in your coldest areas, I think they were, I should have brought up some stats. I feel like, you know, you could, there's a slide that they have on the electrification coaching, where it talks about how much you could save per year based on the, what you're installing.

Yeah. I just looked it up. It could be anywhere from 6,000 to 25,000, depending on size of your home, type of heat pump, presence of backup, heating, regional climate, state of existing ductwork, and installation and labor.

So I think it varies depending on, pretty wildly, depending on the home you're trying to heat and cool. So heat pumps do cooling too, right?

Yes.

Yeah. So it replaces the heat, the heat and the AC.

So I have an HVAC system right now. I have two compressors outside and I have the furnaces up in my attic and to replace those was about $20,000 because I need two. I've got two-story.

So when I talked to the same person that installed my traditional furnace, they said I could do a hybrid system and it would be about the same cost, but it would be a heat pump with gas backup, which I don't think you need in Texas. You might want it in very cold climates, but in Texas, you don't need a hybrid system. It's just they don't really know.

They still doesn't seem to be the experience here for a pure heat pump installation.

Interesting.

I think that's your biggest problem. Like, every time everybody I talk to is the experience with heat pumps. That's what we're lacking.

So how do you, I think about that too. Like, if money was no object, how could I start some sort of HVAC school or heat pump school?

Yeah, that's interesting. Do you see there being pushback? Like, is carrier or other big HVAC people, you know, trying to silence the heat pump movement, you know?

No, I think carrier has one. So I think they're all kind of got their lines. You know, even Mitsubishi has their traditional HVAC versus heat pump because it's different in different markets.

Like in Hawaii, it's mostly those split, those mini splits like you talked about earlier. It's you're having a mini split per room. And that's what you can do if you just like want AC in your bedroom.

Like like I did in Hawaii, I just wanted we wanted AC to sleep at night. Our bedroom was the only spot of the house that did not get the trade winds coming through it. The rest of the time, all our windows were open and we had that cross breeze.

So we didn't need it in the other parts of the house. So yeah, they all have they all have their heat pump arms. They may not call them that.

They may just call them their mini splits or something like that. Because depending on the region, that's people use it. So tropical areas, they're real popular.

Our podcast is basically like two types of listeners, like someone just getting into the job market, trying to find their way or someone trying to pivot. And they've had their career in X and they want to move into much more, something to match their passion. Do you have any advice toward people wanting to make that pivot into clean tech and climate roles?

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.

Yeah, I quit my job in biotech in March of 2024, just because I wanted to give myself space to understand what I wanted to do next. And it's really hard with climate tech when you make that choice that you want to be in climate tech. There's so many interesting problems to solve that it takes you a while to figure out like what really excites you.

So, you know, I did a, I just left myself open. I can be supply chain for any company in this space, da da da. And then I would see job postings and I'd look at their business model and I'd be like, it's kind of boring.

You know, and then like, I just kind of kept going back and forth, like should I go back into biotech and really just kind of focus on how to make supply chain more efficient? You know, that's, I was doing that for a long time. That's a good space.

But I kept finding myself being drawn to the built environment and excited about the built environment. And, you know, and that's when I realized. So like I said, I quit March of 2024.

I think August of 2025, I was like, OK, this is what keeps coming up for me. This is where I get excited. This is what I need to focus on.

And the people of Green Beta, the group that Chris and I are part of, like they helped me rewrite my LinkedIn profile. And boom, I started seeing job postings and connecting more with people in that space and getting excited and doing soft interviews or informational interviews about roles. So I think give yourself the space and the time to find out what excites you and where you're really drawn.

And it's going to be hard because you got to pay the bills too. So you'll probably be pulled back into whatever role you're doing, you had been doing for a long time, just maybe to make ends meet. But once you find that passion, you can start really networking and seeing where it's going to take you.

I think that's one of the lessons learned for me was, if you're passionate about climate solutions and there's probably a couple of them very specifically that get your attention. But then within them, there are different sectors, and you really can't effectively network until you narrow down your sector. Because it's like your own little industry.

You don't network into finance the same way you network into real estate. They're just different even though they play in the same ball field, but they're different games. And that's probably some of the best advice.

You really have to narrow down one or two niches and start to learn that niche and learn that language. And then all of a sudden, the networking just takes off. And I think we all know at this point, with the job market as it is, applying for jobs on a job site does not get you a job anymore.

Like it's really about networking. And to effectively network, you have to drill down into a niche.

Yeah. And you'll connect with so many people who are doing so many cool things, but it may not be the space that you want to even be in. So you do at the end of the day have to say, okay, these are the companies that I want to start focusing on, and these are the people I want to start networking with now that I've figured it out.

Yeah.

So the full side of that question, I think, is if you're a small or mid-size organization that wants to sort of start embracing clean tech, what's the first step?

You mean in a manufacturing space or?

Yeah, I mean, that's your sort of expertise, but anywhere also.

Well, I guess I'll use real estate development. I've been connecting with an old boss of mine that he's still doing real estate development here in Texas. I sent him my article when I wrote it last February, and we just started connecting about what he should do for electrification of his multi-family developments.

And he's a big oil and gas guy. He grew up in Texas. But even he's seeing the value of electrifying because it will keep his bills lower.

And maybe he's only going to electrify his common areas, and not the units of the people that he's renting to or selling to. But it's a step. And now he's thinking about doing assisted living clubs, kind of, and how much, you know, I've been working with him on how much can he electrify, how much can he use that, like, installing heat pumps and electric ranges to reduce emissions for older people who may have lung problems, you know, breathing issues.

Use that as a marketing tool for his, you know, club that he's doing. So creating kind of a rooftop plan for him to, for what he can put up as far as heat pump compressors and solar panels, like how much of that solar will cover. It probably will only cover his common areas, but now he's even excited about doing like a big, a Tesla mega pack or something like that, right?

So using that as a marketing tool too, that, you know, we have this many hours of electricity if the grape goes out.

Nice.

So there's ways to, in small doses, start talking about making those changes.

Do you encounter the climate change as a hoax people, or are you kind of removed from that?

No, I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm in Austin, Texas, and I'm pleasantly surprised with how big of a sustainability kind of energy community there is here. I did during South by Southwest, at a sustainability event, come across somebody who was like, yeah, I just don't really believe in the whole climate change thing.

And I was just like, that's interesting, but I happened to be with my neighbor who's like a policy person. He's like, yeah, you can think that, but there's a lot of evidence that this is what we're experiencing, and how do you kind of justify that? So he was much better.

I think I'm still taken aback when I have that experience by somebody. It's like, there's so much science though.

I mean, I think there's evidence in our daily lives now. Like we all know the weather is significantly different than it was when we were growing up, and the seasons are different, the snowfall is different. Interesting about you being in Texas, they're pretty actually, Texas is like a sneaky state when it comes to renewables.

Because they're one of the largest producing states. One of the largest, of all the states, they have the largest production of renewable energy. They keep their like oil and gas kind of brand, but they are producing renewable energy at a much higher rate than most of the other states.

Yeah, and they say that's because it's such an unregulated market, right? But really since winter storm Uri hit us, it's almost like they doubled down on renewables.

Yeah.

And this year, I saw an interesting article, like this year, they kind of had their system shut down, you know, the electrical system shut downs that are normal, like they're scheduled for maintenance. And the only reason why we got through them without any sort of electrical shutdowns was because of renewables. And they're saying now, you know, we need to think about adjusting our maintenance shutdowns because the hotter temperatures are lasting longer, which is what happened here in Texas.

It didn't cool down, it didn't rain, but we fortunately had renewables to keep our grid going. Yeah.

It's amazing. And the other reason why, it's an unregulated industry, but the reality is it's faster and cheaper to spin up a renewable power producing plant than it is an oil and gas. Oil and gas takes many, many, many more years and costs a lot more to have an oil and gas power plant than it does to spin up a wind or solar.

Yeah. Well, and now the big thing here, trying to get as many oil and gas resources as possible pivoting to something else, the big push here is geothermal. Yeah.

Wish we could have had that conversation with them like 30 years ago, but here we are. It does make me think of like legal marijuana and how that was just like, how dare you and that was just for dirt bags or whatever and then like all these hedge fund people and people in the Bush administration started getting into like, oh, there's money to be made here. Oh, I know.

Don't get me started on Texas and legal marijuana. I mean, they're leaving so much revenue on the table there.

Yeah.

Instead, we've got our district attorney trying to make THC illegal.

Doesn't seem like a great way to spend time.

No. He's pissing off a lot of people, but then that's his usual thing.

You seem like you keep yourself educated, keep going on, keep staying engaged. Talk about staying inspired and what you try to do to keep it moving.

I think the things we're seeing in climate change, the impacts we're starting to experience every year, every month, these mega storms we're having in the Atlantic, they can really scare you and make you almost freeze and panic. But at the same time, the way I see it is that before 2030, if we really put our best and brightest into it, we're going to see some, and even maybe if only 50 percent of the best and brightest go into it, we're going to see some amazing innovations in our electrical grid, in the technology, despite the efforts to put a chokehold and keep oil and gas in the forefront. But there's so many people that want to innovate in this space that I think we're going to see some really cool shit come out of it, you know?

And that's what inspires me.

I just came back from Global Forum, CleanTech Open, the Accelerator's Global Forum, which is partnered with Verge, which I think is called Trellis 25 now, I'm not sure. But I have a different take on it, like the technology and the innovation is there. We have all of the solutions we need to solve this.

That's why I like talking to you so much, it's the ability to commercialize, it's the ability to get it to market in a for-profit environment because the public funds are not coming, right? At least not now. And so I think that's where I think your skill set applies to a lot of these startups is just being able to understand that process to get them to market.

They understand the science, they understand the technology they've built. But where that knowledge gap is, is how do I commercialize this? How do I get this to market?

How do I do this at scale? And that is, like I said, I think I did a LinkedIn post recently and I wasn't like, the cleantech innovation isn't coming. I was like, it's here.

And that's how I felt after the event two weeks ago. I was just like, this has already happened. You know, the level of tech that is, that these, you know, I sat through pitches and, you know, walked through the tables and stuff.

And I'm like, like, the problem is solved. Like, how do we get these to market? Do you know, to actually implement these solutions is, it's exciting and equally frustrating at the same time.

Yeah. I mean, I guess you're right. I remember going back to engineering school and I'd been in business for a long time.

I'd been working for a investment bank. I'd been working on a seed capital fund and investor relations for two years. And going back to school, masters in engineering and all these young engineers, you know, complaining about having to take English, having to learn how to make a slide.

You could have made that in life.

Right.

I was like, you know, you can be as nerdy as you want. You can be all up in the weeds about your technology innovation. But if you can't communicate what the hell you've created, like you're not going to get any money.

Right.

So you need, you know, you're not necessarily going to want to hire a translator every time. Like I can be geeky and I can help you understand how cool this technology is at the same time. But so I think that's like to me, that's where my engineering background helps.

Like I love the tech and I love getting into it, but I'm not techie enough to create it. But I can help translate what you've done to real people with money.

That's an amazing skill and high demand.

We had this little discussion at work, and my boss was trying to figure out why no one was doing this initiative that he wanted people to do. And I said, well, how are you communicating it to the rest of the company? And he's like, well, this, this, this, and this.

I can't remember what he said, but how it was, but he's like, we're communicating it. We're just not doing it effectively. And I said, then you're not communicating it, are you?

Yes.

You forgot the effective part.

Yeah. I mean, you really like, I think I had a boss that said this to me a long time ago. It's like, talk to everybody like they're five years old, if you want things to get done.

So, you know, and that, that's always helped me. Like, how do I break it down into the simplest workflow and the simplest language? Treat everybody like they're five years old and they, they need to do this.

When I started in marketing, it was communicate like you're at the eighth grade level. And now the recommendation is communicate at the fifth grade level. So two decades, we have gone in an interesting direction.

Yeah. And that fifth grader has a phone in their face and doesn't talk to humans. Yeah.

Our last like silly question is, if your job or career was a sitcom, who plays you? And it could be a real or fictional person.

Oh my God. I actually wrote down the answer to that, and I didn't bring it. Hold on.

I got to get my paper.

Okay.

We can edit this part of you running to get your paper. My other question I've been trying is, if you could point a billboard at the White House, without obscenities, what would it say?

Install heat pumps in the ballroom.

That's a pretty good answer.

So, Jennie, it's been a pleasure, and I appreciate you talking with us. Any parting thoughts or words of advice for people entering cleantech?

Yeah, I mean, try to find the... You don't necessarily need to do an accelerator or a program, but if you do, you connect to some really great people. So find the one that fits for you to kind of help you figure out what your niche is.

And then once you figure out your niche, like, just really find that... Find the process of reaching out to people to learn as much as you can from them, and then, you know, also create kind of a habit of following up and checking in on them and how you can support them.

Nice.

That's great. I think that's probably a great place to leave it. Kristen, any parting thoughts?

No, just thank you for your time.

No, thanks for inviting me.

Thanks for scheduling.

Yeah, we finally got this on the books. All right. Appreciate your time, and thank you again.

Yeah, thank you.

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