Tributaries with Subak: Cody Simms

Introducing Tributaries with Subak 

Why Tributaries? Tributaries are smaller rivers that act as vital habitats to carry sediment, wildlife and more into larger bodies of water, contributing to the specific conditions that support different species. By bringing diverse voices into Subak, we hope to generate conversation, expand our perspectives, and learn from each other, and have a larger impact on the wider discussion - just as a tributary does on a larger body of water. 

I’m Maisie Kemp, Marketing & Communications Associate at Subak. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Cody Simms, Partner at MCJ Collective, an entrepreneurial commons that enables the flow of information, ideas, and capital necessary to accelerate individual climate journeys and advance collaboration. In addition to his work with MCJ, is also co-founder of Climate Changemakers, a 501(c)(4) climate-focused political action network that got its start in the MCJ Member community. Cody previously served as Senior Vice President of Climate & Sustainability at Techstars and as an investing Partner in Techstars' institutional venture funds. He is also the co-host of the My Climate Journey podcast and previously hosted the Techstars Climate Tech Podcast. 

Thanks for joining me Cody, please could you tell me a bit more about your background, and how you got to your current position as Partner at MCJ Collective?

I grew up in the Midwest in Kansas and studied Chinese in college because I wanted to learn something I didn't know anything about. I lived in China a few times in college and then moved to San Francisco after university and fell into the dot com boom. 

My very first job in search engines taught me how the internet worked and I've accidentally been in tech ever since. In 2013, I joined Techstars. I had been spending time mentoring startups in product work and joined to launch the first Techstars accelerator in Los Angeles, which at the time was with Disney. In the last few years at Techstars, after working with thousands of founders and hundreds of startups, I realised that the companies that were most motivating to me were the ones solving large, real world problems and particularly the ones focused on sustainability and climate change.

I ended up creating the climate tech and sustainability practice at Techstars and then I met Jason and Thai and the team at MCJ. They were fundamental in my own climate journey, as I was an early community member at MCJ, an early listener to the My Climate Journey podcast and an early backer of the MCJ collective venture fund. I then joined them at MCJ around a year ago.

What made you decide to move into working on climate, and how has your work life changed since doing so? 

A few things happened in particular. One was being inspired by the companies that I was engaged with at Techstars that were working on this space. I also distinctly remember I was at a conference in Haiti, and I was laying in the ocean at a break between sessions, looking at the deforested mountainside that was above me and realising that I didn't know a lot about what was happening to the planet and it was something I needed to learn more about. I felt like there were tech innovations that could help and there were stories that needed to be told. So I decided at that point to really lean into what was going on in that space.

So, I started spending more and more time with the startups at Techstars that were working in climate tech. I then enrolled in an online climate change programme called Terra.do. I also started engaging a lot with the MCJ community, and met a few people that I ended up  co-founding a climate nonprofit called Climate Changemakers. It’s a 501(c)(4) political action nonprofit, all about helping to turn everyday people into effective climate advocates through regular habitual climate action. We call it an hour of action that we encourage people to take once a week. So as I leaned into climate, I realised politics was a big lever. 

As someone who has worked extensively across climate startups, could you share some of your insights on how the sector has changed over the past few years?

What I have noticed is a wave of talent moving into working on climate. A lot of this talent comes from traditional tech people who are realising that they want to make their next chapter about purpose. A lot of Silicon Valley was built on the promise of changing the world. I think many people are recognising that with climate technology there are opportunities to apply the skills they have to real world problems that are impacting themselves, their children, future generations and other life on earth. 

It reminds me a lot of the early internet where if you didn't have a software engineering degree, you questioned if you could work in tech. Nowadays, it's perfectly normal for someone without a tech degree to work at Google or Facebook because it's a business - you need business skills. I feel like with climate tech, it's somewhat the same. A lot of the companies start out very technical, but then to hit scale, they need the experience of people who have seen scale.

Building on that, what do you see as the biggest barriers to scaling climate tech?

Many of the climate innovations do require heavy amounts of capital because they require heavy amounts of infrastructure. With many climate innovations, whether it's around carbon capture, new technologies to decarbonize industry or mobility and the build out of electric vehicles, all of these require building factories, they require building production facilities, they require having access to feed stocks or materials and moving these materials around the earth. 

So, from a cost of business perspective, climate requires in many cases more capital, especially as often venture capital isn't going to fund those hard operational costs. So, it requires having access to debt facilities or other forms of project financing that just adds complexity and risk to a project. 

Can you talk a bit more about your mission at MCJ Collective? 

At MCJ Collective, we view ourselves as an entrepreneurial commons which is there to enable the flow of information, ideas and capital, and to accelerate climate journeys and break down silos around climate innovation.

We do this through three main pillars. We have MCJ content, which is how it all started - primarily the My Climate Journey podcast that my partner Jason started and that I'm now doing some of the hosting duties on, which is a platform for having climate conversations with leading voices in the climate space. Under the content umbrella we also have a popular weekly newsletter featuring contributions from the MCJ community.  Our second pillar is a member community where people work together to find solutions around climate. It’s a very active member community that requires an application and a small membership fee to be a part of. Finally, we have our capital arm which is a venture fund that we use to back ambitious founders that are scaling climate solutions. We write small cheques, our capital isn't necessarily what makes us unique - it's the network and the community around MCJ. Once we back a company, we can put the turbo boosters behind and really help those companies with access to talent, business development and the MCJ community. 

A big problem that we seek to address at Subak is this silo mentality which poses barriers to working collaboratively to address climate change. Do you see this in your work, and what do you think are the key steps to encouraging collaboration? 

I think what's really interesting about the climate space when it comes to collaboration is the amount of cross-disciplinary knowledge that is helping to solve some of these problems. The current global economy is heavily built on a fossil fuel based infrastructure. That means that business often has very verticalised orientations - you need to bring in people who have expertise in one line of way of doing things. That's been the de facto way of doing things for decades and now, you're combining it with new ways of thinking. You're having to break down those lines of communication because you're de-verticalising these industries.

We are almost replatforming the world right now, and eventually we'll build new vertical lines of business on top of these new platforms that are happening. What is fascinating right now is taking people who are really great subject matter experts in one area, and asking them to think about a new way of doing things, and then applying the skill sets that they build in that new way of doing things.

A community like MCJ exists to be that shared space where those experts who understand one way of applying technology or applying science or applying business can look at new examples and think about how they can accelerate. All of that creates this place where the common thread is climate, as opposed to the common thread being one industry or another. So as opposed to an industry trade group, which focuses on solutions in that industry, we become this horizontal layer that works across all these industries where people can apply their skills and help each other out.

Could you tell me about the latest innovation or investment in climate tech that really excited you? 

The first company I’d highlight from our portfolio is called Charm Industrial, who are building a way to reinject carbon back underground. They're doing that by taking agricultural waste, turning it into bio oil and then sequestering that back underground and selling it as a carbon credit. To date, of all of the carbon capture and removal companies out there, they've sequestered the most tons of CO2. 

Another investment I’d highlight is in a company called Fleetzero who are building battery electric cargo ships. They have been creating a whole battery electric model where you can swap batteries as cargo for ships when they come in and out of port. They're early in their journey, but we’re seeing a lot of early progress that I think is super interesting and just goes to show that a lot of what we need to do is rethink our systems and the reasons why they are the way they are.

Another that I think is really interesting to highlight is a company called Moment Energy. They're realising that with the growth of EVs there's going to be an absolute wave of waste EV batteries. Typically when an EV is no longer able to drive anymore, the battery itself still has somewhere around 80% of its life and power left. So, Moment Energy is taking all of these batteries, which by the way, are really hard and expensive to recycle, and instead of recycling them, it is combining them and turning them into power sources that can be used by buildings. They’re creating a circular economy around EV batteries, while solving the storage issue as well.

How can our readers stay up to date with you and your work? 

I hope people check out My Climate Journey podcast. We have done 300 or so episodes now of conversations with leading voices on climate, ranging from climate scientists to policy makers, to, financiers to entrepreneurs that are building in the space. I’d also encourage people also to join the MCJ membership, which they can learn about on our website mcjcollective.com.

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