80 climate startup pitch decks on my desktop. 58 claim they will be doing things at scale. Most of the rest have similar goals. Typically in some variation of “decarbonising [industry] at scale”, “planetary scale regeneration, or “when we’re at scale we’ll save [tons of carbon here]”.
The possibility and potential of scale then justifies the need for speed. Speed to prototype. Speed to market. Speed to raise, hire, and grow.
Speed and scale
This duo is arguably the keystone of the venture capitalist system. The scale of returns desired and celebrated by investors is typically in the 10x to 70x range. Anything less is not a ‘win’. The real celebration is then around how quickly that return can be generated, with five years being ‘average’ and anything less than that being the real goal.
All things being equal this would be fine. Having a lasting impact and shaping technology and society is after all a lot of us aspire to in some way or another.
But all things are not equal. Moving fast has the potential to break things and the bigger you are, the bigger the impact and consequences. Famously Mark Zuckerberg made this Facebook’s motto back in 2009 going as far as saying that “Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” Zuckerberg of course was talking about breaking “software” but we have seen since then that Facebook has broken so much more including privacy, mental health, and democracy.
In last few decades we have seen more claims that this attitude, as embodied by capitalism, is a core cause of climate change and biodiversity loss. And not just from the fringes but increasingly from reputable academics and institutions like Kate Raworth, University of North Carolina, University of Manchester, The Guardian, Sage Journals, University of Boulder, New Statesman, University of Oregon, and even the University of Cambridge.
They don’t all agree of course, but the fact that such a question is becoming mainstream in academia and journalism is important.
So then, given the very real possibility that speed and scale are a leading cause of the various crises we face, how did it come to pass that speed and scale are the poster children of the climate tech and impact investment movements?
Enter John Doerr. The famed venture capitalist behind Kleiner Perkins, the American VC firm that has had a hand in almost every major technology company you’ve heard of from Sun Microsystems and Compaq to Google, Amazon, Uber and literally hundreds of others (850+ as of 2017).
Famously Doerr broke down in tears on stage during a TED Talk in 2007 where he cited his daughter’s remark, “your generation created this problem, you better fix it”, as a call to fight global warming.
A billionaire venture capitalist publicly in tears? Well we must listen to him then.
And climate tech listened. When he published his book Speed and Scale in 2021 it almost overnight became the climate tech investor’s bible. The book legitimised the idea that speed and scale could now safely be applied to the green economy and therefore we need not change how we think or operate to ‘save the planet’. Suddenly there was the prospect of becoming a “climate tech billionaire” with companies like Siemens openly salivating at the prospect of accelerators like Carbon13 planting the seeds for such unicorn companies.
I think John Doerr should have paid better attention to his daughter’s words. If he accepts that his generation created this problem, then it follows that he needs to also accept that the problem was created by means of a particular system, worldview, and frame of mind that his generation applied.
To simply attempt to fix the problem with the same thinking that caused it in the first place is, at best, naive. Because the bias towards speed and scale also requires a bias towards rapid and constant action without pausing for adequate reflection and so we are more likely to perpetuate the problem. As we can see for example by the fact that the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability he funded and founded is now “receiving funding from ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Shell, Saudi Aramco, Petrobras, and many other oil and gas companies.” Not much of a system change or transition there.
Care and depth is what is required.
Let’s zoom out for a minute and ignore the question of whether capitalism is or isn’t majorly responsible for climate breakdown.
Why would you, in the first place, follow the advice of individuals like John Doerr or Bill Gates (who’s also weighed in) who have zero experience or track record of dealing with issues of ecological regeneration and globalised poverty? I am certain that he has educated himself in the meantime and can speak about a range of climate issues.
But that doesn’t give him depth.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to go and see what people who’ve dedicated their entire lives to these issues have to say and suggest before looking at what the newcomers are saying, whether or not they’re billionaires?
After five years or so of being involved in climate tech in various ways not once do I remember anyone mentioning the names Vandana Shiva or Helena Norberg-Hodge.
I mention these two women because they are roughly contemporaries of the two men mentioned above. All four of them began their work round about the mid-to-late seventies or early-eighties. Four decades apiece give or take. The latter two concerned, as discussed, with speed and scale, and the former two with the effects of that approach.
You cannot possibly read or listen to their work without at least entertaining the possibility that speed and scale have broken a lot of things. Not just climate and ecological systems but traditions, livelihoods, futures, and lives.
They also propose solutions. But nobody in climate tech talks about them, because they are very, very inconvenient.
It is, for example, not possible to become a “climate tech billionaire” by giving Indian farmers seed independence back or by disentangling local and indigenous communities from exploitative supply chains. You will not found a celebrated “unicorn” company by working to decolonialise energy production or by creating open access energy production knowledge.
The only route to capitalist speed and scale is closed knowledge, centralisation, and inequality. So John Doerr’s and Bill Gates’ books are freely handed out by impact investors to entrepreneurs while Vandana Shiva’s freely-available work is sidelined.
The antidote to speed and scale is care and depth. Care deeply about everything and look deeply down into the rabbit hole of what you are caring about.
Photo by Conor Samuel on Unsplash
Leave a Reply