3 Takeaways from a Fireside Chat with Adam Wolf
How Eion is building towards world positive change
Last week I sat down with Adam Wolf, CEO and founder of Eion at South Park Commons to have a fireside chat about building world-class climate tech companies. Climate tech has taken over the buzz of Web3 in 2023. Over $70B flowed into climate tech funds in 2022, up 89% from 2021 and we’ve seen increased corporate commitments from Stripe Climate, Alphabet, Shopify, McKinsey, and Meta. These commitments took the form of Frontier, which is dedicated to purchasing $925M worth of permanent carbon removal from companies developing this technology in the next nine years.
The best climate tech companies are building with a holistic, interdisciplinary mindset towards a common cause
Climate tech is an interdisciplinary space built at the intersection of science, tech, and policy. You need to be able to talk to regulators, private companies, investors, and academics. Diversity of thought and background is a huge advantage in corralling different stakeholders around a common cause. I love founders that come from diverse backgrounds because they can translate and distill hard concepts into simple terms for any audience.
Adam’s embodies such a diverse background. He comes from academia, particularly in agronomy. In grad school, he learned about rock weathering technology, which inspired him to start Eion. Eion's rock weathering technology ensures carbon removal through its proprietary chemistry, meeting the needs of both farmers and carbon buyers. Adam has worked in academia collaborating with luminaries at Princeton and Stanford, publishing works in scientific journals like Science and Nature. All of his lived experiences as an academic, agronomist, and researcher inform how he works with multiple stakeholders. In building Eion, Adam works with farmers, and industrial partners (truck drivers, rock crushers, port operators). He has to work independently from party affiliation with stakeholders that come to decarbonization from different perspectives, but share the same values around stewardship of nature, and the dignity of equal pay for equal work. Climate tech is as complex as it is exciting for this reason, because creating world positive change requires rallying people from different walks of life toward a shared cause.
Fundraising for climate tech companies requires aligning your company’s North Star with a unit economics narrative.
There is still a lot of frothiness in the market around climate tech companies as unit economics and margins are quite slim in this space. Often companies are building in nascent spaces in blue ocean markets. In crafting an investor pitch, Adam advised focusing on the large market size of climate tech companies. Outline the prosocial impact and unit economics to create a valuation at the early stage by modeling out discounted cash flow and computing the NPV. Back into a valuation with your research and financial modeling so you can make a compelling argument why you need a certain price for the round in order to make a stock plan that can attract the best talent.
The timeline for climate tech companies is long, often in the decades. Compounding change takes time.
Having worked in software companies, I’m used to thinking about timelines in terms of sprints, quarter, and branch cuts, but that’s not how climate tech companies operate and achieve lasting impact. Climate tech companies are working on multi-decade long timelines. Similar to hardware and life sciences, these companies require a lot of upfront capital, CapEx, and activation energy to mature.
In order for Eion to harness multiplier effects and scalability, the operations of Adam’s company needs to be lean and cost effective. The way Adam sees it, the operation team owns Cost of Goods (COGS) for a company. Similar to Moore’s law, carbon removal companies need to operate on learning curve models in order to achieve the scalability and cost reduction of software companies. Eion aims to remove carbon by 20x increase this year (12,500), 20x next year (250,000), leading up to 10M tons per year in 2023. Because of their proprietary mineral resources, they have a rock material that can remove up to 20% of all carbon emissions created since the industrial revolution.
As we enter the next era of climate tech companies, I hope we will have more companies like Eion born out of interdisciplinary thinking, building at the intersection of tech, science, and policy, that harness the power of multistakeholder management. Climate tech is bigger than just a singular company; it is a movement of world positive thinkers who can galvanize humanity around a shared cause.