Originally published on Radical on 2024-05-30.
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?