This podcast is a recorded version of Avaana Climate Corner's fireside chat on Talent for the climate economy. The podcast will cover how climate is posing a talent problem and need for upskilling required to address this shift towards sustainability. The episode covers anecdotes from Anshuman's life and what lead him to start Terra.Do followed by a QnA. The transcript of the episode can be accessed here:- https://avaana.simplecast.com/episodes/talent-for-climate-economy
[00:00:00] Riddhi: hello and welcome everyone to Avaana Climate Corners Fireside Chat on Talent with the Climate Economy. We have Anshuman here who is the founder of Terra.do. Thank you so much Anshuman for making the time for us. I'm part of the investment team with Avaana Climate sustainability fund, looking at investments across our focus sectors of energy, resources supply chains, mobility as well as agriculture. But in a nutshell, anything and everything to do with climate tech.
Anshuman is the founder of Terra.do, which is the world's largest online platform for learning and working in climate. Terra's mission is to get a hundred million people to work on solving climate change in this decade itself. Anshuman is a serial entrepreneur and he actually co-founded and sold his first startup, which was righthalf.com, while he was still an undergrad IIT Bombay. After his mba, A at Stanford G S B, he spent some time selling solar lights in Vietnam and working with an Indian member of Parliament before turning to New York to work with Deloitte and then with Google. Before [00:01:00] Terra.do anshuman was the chief product officer of the now NASDAQ listed. Make my trip and go IB bo, which he joined after the acquisition of his startup, mygola.com.
Thank you so much Anshuman for being here and for addressing our
[00:01:12] Anshuman: audience.
Thank you so much for having me Riddhi.
[00:01:14] Riddhi: Amazing. So I'm gonna, kick things right off. I think as we've seen, you have seen the the internet dotcom era. You've also seen the mainstream tech era with companies like Make My Trip and Goibibo. What really was the aha moment that triggered your move from this mainstream tech to now working
[00:01:32] Anshuman: on Terra.Do
as you can see from the bio that Riddhi share that I've had a winding road to the point where I have, where I'm at right now. But it does feel like a culmination of so many dots that have connected back here again. So my, one of my key moments was the year 2016. And 2016 was when Trump happened in the US..
Brexit happened in the uk and my family and I were, we were all in at the great Barrier Reef[00:02:00] snorkeling. My daughter was old enough to snorkel and I have this beautiful video of her swimming through the reefs and even singing while she's still inside the water. She's entranced. And my son was too young at that time to be able to snorkel.
So he was on the boat. And that year was the first year of the mass bleachings that killed 30% of the reef because of global warming. And I realized there was a bit of a shock that I had been taking it for granted that the world would obviously be a better place for our children. And when that thing don't be the case, that we might have to kinda actively take apart in shaping that.
So that was one of the awakenings. And then if you look at my career, I've worked in a bunch of interesting non-profits for-profits all through including working on political action in. And there's always this dichotomy between profit and purpose, right? So you can choose one over the other.
There's always this oh, let's make money first and then we'll give it away. Philanthropically in the second half of our career. And that always felt like a false dichotomy, but it was very hard to marry that together. And then, of course in around [00:03:00] 2018, 19 as I started looking a little bit more at what I wanna do, I'd been always very climate anxious and I started looking at the space a lot more closely and spoke to maybe hundreds of people.
Everything from nuclear fusion to environmental justice in India, US all across the world. And came back with this big aha moment, which is that I had never seen profit and purpose combined together in such a major way before, in fact, so much so that it felt like the early days of the internet when I had started my first company while in undergrad. It felt like the same confluence of factors was happening, which made internet what it is right now. I started seeing some of the most talented people raising their hands and trying to get into that space into climate. I started seeing capital coming in drones, especially in the US and to a certain extent in Europe, and now increasingly with with someone like you also coming into India and other places.
And it felt the world was still misattributing or misunderstanding how big a deal this was. So I remember back in 1999 the [00:04:00] internet was called New Media. And I think of it as a preservative term, right? Saying, oh, new media, this is like cute little thing that these nerds have built out that'll be on the side that some media companies will have to worry about and everything else will remain the same.
And of course, 20 years later, nothing has remained the same because of the internet. It runs everything. It's a bedrock of a lot of that we do, including our politics. And to me, climate change felt the same thing, especially once you start looking at. The science behind it that is inexorable, right?
There's so much that to unpack there. And the crisis is one part. But then the classic Chinese proverb which is that every crisis is also an opportunity. And it became also very clear that if as a world we managed to get our act together, then this would be the biggest transformation of the industrial economy across the world that we have ever seen as big, if not bigger than the industrial Revolution.
So to me it felt like here we are talking about potentially saving the planet on one side. And on the other side, having trillions of dollars being deployed. And that marriage of [00:05:00] profit and purpose was just something that was really attracted to me. So I said, okay, I'm gonna work for the next 30, 40, 50 years whatever I have left in climate in all kinds of different capacities.
[00:05:09] Riddhi: Amazing. And yeah, I think definitely climate sustainability, is the next digital, it is the revolution that I think is really at our doorstep and cannot be ignored for a second longer. And yeah, I think on that note, why don't we also dig a little bit deeper into Terra.Do so what was the thought process behind starting Terra?
And walk us through some of the wins and more importantly, the learnings along the way.
[00:05:33] Anshuman: Yeah. Absolutely. So first of all, the name of the company itself, right? Which is kinda a funny story. So I was living in Bangalore at that time, and for those of you who are familiar with kormangla especially there is this cafe, a hole in the wall called Cafe Terra which is where I used to sit out of to have all my meetings, which are related to climate.
And one fine day and this is early 2020, right before the pandemic was about to hit us. And a [00:06:00] stranger at the other table walked up to me and said, look, I keep hearing you talk about climate. If you're serious, you should talk to my sister-in-law and sister-in-law happens to be living in Hawaii which is how I met Kamal, my co-founder.
And in fact, kamal and I collaborated, became co-founders without ever having met each other for, and worked together for almost two years before we finally met each other. So that's the power of Zoom. Yes. I was very clear that we start a remote company even before the pandemic started.
Because what we are trying to prove is that we can take talented people across the world and get them to collaborate together on the internet to solve one of the hardest problems that ever. So our company better live to that promise as well. But then of course the pandemic happened and it stole my thunder.
So anytime I tell people that we're a remote only company, they're like, yeah, of course everyone's a remote only company. Big deal. That's the terra part of the name. The do part of the name was also very important to us because we realized pretty early on, and I'll tell you how we got there, that learning was gonna be an important component of of transit millions and millions of [00:07:00] people into climate. But we also wanted to make sure that we don't get sucked into that as an end in itself. The end is to get people working in climate. Doing in climate and learning is definitely a stepping stone, but not the end story. So we wanna make sure that to make sure that we all capture that into our thesis from day one.
So we, we had the company was Terra Do. And the insight was basically this that as you look across the board, the scale of transformation that we are talking about is that we are gonna change energy. We'll, we are gonna change how we do agriculture. We change how we do transportation, manufacturing, construction, even horizontals like finance.
And not just in one country not just in just the western world not just in western world and countries like India and China, but also sub-Saharan Africa. And not just in not in a hundred years, but in 10 to 20 years. So this is an unprecedented scale of transformation. And in my math is about a third to even a half of the world's GDP is gonna look very different 20 years from now.
Now if this is as big as that, you would need a third to a [00:08:00] half of the working population, working on climate in some shape or form. So this transition and at that time, 2028 felt like there were about 2 million people across the world working in climate and sustainability in some way. So that math didn't compute, it was a clear arbitrage there where you needed that number to go up by a hundred.
So this combination that you, there was all this friction that individuals like myself were encountering when they were trying to shift into climate. And the fact that we would have to do that a hundred million. That presented an opportunity, to me it looked like an internet scale opportunity. To me, it felt like we could build something in the middle that would reduce that friction and it'll create incredible value for the world and for ourselves as well.
So that's how tariffs started. And at the root level, we think of ourselves as a ramp that will get hundred million people working in climate, and we'll build everything that's needed to get there. And I can, maybe I'll give you a short version of the journey since then. So when we started out and this is as much a story of a founder trying to discover product market fit as anything else.
[00:08:58] Riddhi: With a lot of people here.
[00:08:59] Anshuman: But yeah,[00:09:00] so as an entrepreneur, I was trying to find the shortest path to the answer, and it felt like a labor marketplace, a talent marketplace should be the easiest thing, right? You have employers who want talent, you have people who wanna work in climate.
Let's just make something that looks like indeed.com or something like that. And the rest shall follow. But we didn't see that much energy on the employer side at that time. And I, and the climate ecosystem was still booting up. And it felt everyone was kinda had their heads in the sand trying to just get outta the door and hiding was not necessarily the top thing on their.
But on the individual side, I was blown away by people, incredible quality people raising their hand and saying, I'm gonna work in climate regardless of what's out there. So we said, okay, fine. Let's go where the energy is. Let's solve a problem for these guys and then figure out, if we can build a business outta that.
So the problem that they were facing all the time, Look, I'm this capable mid-career individual with, has all these different skills and I wanna work in climate, but I don't know where to begin. And my challenge is not [00:10:00] just to go to a job board and start looking at jobs. My challenge is I'm doing this for for a variety of different reasons, including having the maximum possible impact with my skills.
I don't even know how to frame that. I don't even know how to think about the climate. And the solutions out there so I need some kind of a navigational element to it. And of course, it also and especially for the people who were early at that time, it felt lonely. It felt you were the only person in your group who was thinking about doing something like this.
And your professional network was not very helpful and so on. So it said, fine. Okay, let's build something for them. And we launched a learning cohort just 20 people in May, 2020. The incredible part was who showed up for this cohort. So we had this person who was an SVP at Techstars, launched 2000 startup across the world, who's now a partner at one of the larger funds, climate funds here in the us.
We had this guy who was CTO at a 3 billion health tech company, and in the middle of Covid, remember, right? So he is saying, I'm, I think healthcare is taken care of. There are enough smart people working on that problem. I'm gonna work on climate. And so we said, okay, there's [00:11:00] something. So we started growing that program and then being the tech play kinda a mindset that we had.
We said, let's size the whole thing. So because climate is so many different things. So then over a period of next six months, we built a platform that could host multiple learning programs, and we ended up over the next year launching about 15 different programs. Everything from this bootcamp that we had originally started with to a program for on EVs, focused on fleet operators who are deploying EVs, a program on hydrogen for people in the energy industry who are looking to deploy hydrogen and so on.
So that became the learning part of our journey. And in the ideal world if this had been a thriving large ecosystem already, that's all that we would've done. Just gotten deeper and better at it. But because again, these are early days, we realized that we will have to build a full stack.
And the fulls stack meant that as soon as learning was done, how do these individuals get employed or deployed in climate? The whole jobs part of it was also, So we ended up building the jobs part of [00:12:00] our business, which has turned out to be a fantastic acquisition tool for us as well. And then of course, the beating heart of all of that was the community.
I think what we're ultimately building is I think the world's largest professional community of people working in climate boots trapped through learning outcomes might be jobs, sometimes startups that people do. But that's where the heart of what we are doing. So
if I have to give a elevator pitch or even a tagline for what we are trying to build in the X for Y kind of a format, I think we are building something that looks like a LinkedIn for climate.
[00:12:29] Riddhi: Amazing. And as someone who has been a Terra alum myself, I think I've definitely seen the power of having that professional network of like-minded people who are working on the same problem statement and attacking it from different different angles and. And I think that's an amazing thing to be a part of. And on the note of Talent for the climate economy want to understand what would be your advice, and I'm trying to think of this as, a pipe of, with the supply side and a demand side, right? So on the supply side, what does someone who want to work in climate, how do they make this [00:13:00] transition successfully? And then now on the demand side, people who are looking for climate talent, so for example, founders like climate tech founders, how do they actually successfully navigate this pipeline of talent that's coming their.
And this is a very open-ended question, and I know that you're the best person to
tackle it.
[00:13:17] Anshuman: No, thank you. So let's start with the supply side, which is individuals looking to work in climate and sustainability. So by the way, we haven't defined what climate and sustainability actually means, but it actually is the widest possible umbrella that and it includes things like biodiversity, includes of course the usual suspects, which is climate tech and sustainability functions inside large organizations and so on and on. So it's a pretty wide umbrella. Now as an individual I have two or three pieces of advice. One is that the climate, landscape is literally everything under the sun, no pun intended.
Yeah, your instinct might be to go jump in and start applying for the first job that shows up calling itself climate. But if you should, I would suggest that you'd rather zoom out for a second and build your [00:14:00] own mental framework of what this space. So there are many ways to do that.
One of the great ways is to come to Terra to be part of one of our learning programs to give you the full holistic picture. But there are lighter approaches as well. So go to something like a Project Drawdown, for example which is this think tank that has put together this massive report on what are the most interesting solutions out there in climate?
And there are so many versions of that you can just. So rocking that, which is saying if I'm thinking about climate, what all do I mean in which sectors have the most impact and which problems are the most unsolved? Is I think a great way to orient yourself first. I think the second thing is to jump into one of our job fairs.
And we do these free job fairs every week. And the reason I say that is because you'll typically, and these are all online, so you'll see about 10 companies climate tech companies or sometimes nonprofits, multilateral institutions, all hiring. So two things happen. One is when you go in, you see the diversity of organizations working on climate and you're like, oh, I didn't even realize that [00:15:00] methane capture is one part of the problem.
But mangrove, reforestation is another part of the climate problem. And scope three emissions tracking is another part of the problem. That is how wide this is. So it opens up your mind. On what the universe looks like. And the second thing that happens is that you have a thousand people also logged into the call along with you and it, and there is this networking session that happens and at the end of it, and we find this every single time when we interview people after these sessions, they say, look, I hadn't realized that.
I thought I was the only one who was thinking about working in climate. And here there are 919 other people like me just as talented. We're also thinking about it. So it feels there's a sense of camaraderie. So that's the second thing I. And maybe the last thing I would say is that use all of that, this should not take you more than, I don't know, 10 hours of work, like the shortest version of this.
At the end of this, have a bit of a thesis around the intersection of your skills and impact in climate. So there are lots of companies which are hiring for all kinds of different roles.[00:16:00] Some of those roles are directly applicable to the skills that you have, but they might not be the most impactful necess.
So that's have just a working thesis that you keep refining as you go and meet companies and network with people in this space. So that's on the supply side, on the demand side of actually good news for all founders and companies which are in the climate space, which is the level of excitement, desire to work in climate amongst talented people, is actually Much larger than the proportion of capital or even sometimes visibility that these companies have right now.
So it's almost like you have to start with with a mindset of abundance. Which is you will not be often struggling with in trying to recruit someone from the latest hottest FinTech company or whatever is cool right now, AI company, because these are people who are coming in with a very different motivation just as skills, sometimes even more who are looking to jump into the few climate companies, which are out there right now.
So therefore, you'll have a reasonable level of demand if you are out there propagating the roles that [00:17:00] you have. But the other thing which I would also call out is that I was in the beginning very worried when we were starting out that look, does it really matter if you're trying to hire a software engineer, what their climate commitment is?
What their climate knowledge is? Sure, they have to be great software engineers, person foremost, and on the margins, if they know anything about climate, that's okay. And I was the skeptic. But now we have about 350 plus climate employers across the world who hire from and this has now been going on for about a year plus.
And what you heard from employers is that the quality of engagement and the level of attrition is completely different for people who come climate committed first. So in that sense, in your interview panel, when you're talking to people, do ask them, why do you care about being in this space?
And I will tell you that sometimes it'll unlock a, an emotional inside their mind that you wouldn't have even expected. And they would go on and on for about five minutes about why this matters to them. And imagine having an employee like that, working for [00:18:00] your company. That's incredible.
Yeah, no, definitely. Because then they bring that same amount of dedication and apply it for with full force to your cause. Yeah, no, that's amazing. I think and you mentioned that on the supply side there is definitely, this concept of an immediately transferable skill set, right?
That people can actually just simply apply to a climate problem. So where do you see is the low hanging fruit today in terms of,
Talent? So I see gaps in a couple of different areas where it seems like there's a lot more demand than there is supply. So if you're an individual who has those skills, you should be jumping on those opportunities.
So one is I mean on the technical side, we see a lot more demand for hardware. Chemical, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering kinda backgrounds folks. And these are all people who typically get sucked outta colleges into a DuPont et cetera. So they're going the big industrial, old economy companies right now where some of them are, by the way, doing great work on sustainability.
So no shade in them. But if [00:19:00] you have those kind of backgrounds, then remember that in, especially in the early days on the climate tech side, those are some of the hardest roles to fill. So do look for that and at the other end from, for people in the business with business kind of backgrounds.
E S G is this massive sector where the skill to talent gap is is, in my opinion almost one is to 10 if not more, which means that the number of roles which are potentially. For E S G are 10 times as many number of people that are actually out there. And the reason is that a lot of this ESG work is happening inside, say a consulting firm that is advising a large fortune thousand customer across the world into this sustainability trans transition.
And what they need are people who have skilled backgrounds. So often they're looking for people who have already had done ESG. In some shape or form before, which as you can imagine is a classic chicken and egg problem, right? Yeah. That if you don't have e s g background, how do you even get into that in the first place?
But a lot of large ESG employers are beginning to [00:20:00] create their own training programs. We are helping set up some of those. And they're trying to start in people who have business backgrounds and article backgrounds who could then come in and there's a big gap there right now.
[00:20:09] Riddhi: Yeah, I think it's amazing to see the range of skillsets that actually are needed ranging from someone who understands E S G and frameworks to someone who understands hardware and how do you solve for, the deeper mechanical problems.
And there is definitely a role to, to be played by literally every single one of us. I think that's the overarching message that I'm gonna take away.
[00:20:30] Anshuman: Yeah, hundred percent. And I'll just give you an example. And I see this as three different buckets of. Of companies, right? Or organizations.
So there's the climate tech world which are typically even in the us which is probably furthest along in terms of capital and timelines. You see mostly 1 billion less than 1 billion, less than unicorn status companies hiring quite a bit. And that's maybe about 50,000 rolls, which are open in the US and Europe and India combined.
Right now. Then which might seem like a reasonable number. [00:21:00] And then of course there are what I call the climate majors. And the climate majors are the Teslas and the Sunruns of the world, or the Renew power in Indias of the world, et cetera, who need essentially every kind of skill. They're just a typical industrial company.
They need project managers CFAs or they need people with sub engineer backgrounds, all kinds of things, right? So that's the climate. And then there is the old economy sustainability organization. So a Unilever, a Nestle et cetera, who are now trying to build a sustainability lens to everything that they do.
So there the kind of roles are, for example, you might be getting into procurement, but procurement with the sustainable supply chain. Now what does that even mean? So that's the kind of rules which are open. If you sigma all of and we are still talking about really just the white collar, the knowledge worker economy right now.
Yeah. There's an entire
[00:21:47] Riddhi: I was just gonna, I was just gonna bring that,
[00:21:49] Anshuman: yeah. Yeah. So just the knowledge workers alone, my sense is that they're about half a million to a million jobs, which are currently waiting to be filled in the climate [00:22:00] economy right now. If you look at the blue collar world as well, it already employs about 5 million people.
And it's growing gangbusters, right? Including in India. And there the demand is potentially two to three times of that. So roughly about in the next three to five years another 10 million people would be employed in the blue collar part of the workforce of just the climate.
[00:22:23] Riddhi: Interesting. And while and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, like you mentioned it's always good to have an employee who actually is high intent and wants to solve for climate.
How do you make that trickle down from this knowledge worker, former economy to the blue worker, through the blue collar worker to this informal economy? How do you make the the urgency, all of that kind of trickle. Because at the end of the day, they are in fact the most vulnerable, populations.
Any thoughts on that?
[00:22:52] Anshuman: Yeah and I'm assuming you mean not just from an employment standpoint, but from an awareness and activation standpoint, right? [00:23:00] Yeah. I'll give you the bigger answer and maybe the smaller answer first, which is, how do we at Terra think about this?
And I'll be candid. I don't want to worry about this problem, and I don't worry about this problem. And that is because unfortunately, the level of awareness about the climate crisis has massively intensified. And I live in California, Which is a developed part of a very developed country. And even here, there are orange skies, right? And if you live in Delhi, the definition of climate is not necessarily global warming, but it is air pollution, which is directly attributable to that too. So all across the world, everyone is sufficiently activated. What is the challenges that there is this window of opportunity.
Between activation and disappointment, so to speak. And I worry a lot about kids coming outta college right now because this generation is hyperactivated about what's happening with climate. But if we don't give them an opportunity to use that to work and bring the skills somewhere within the next [00:24:00] three to four years or five years, then we would've lost that generation to all the normal stuff that happens keeps happening in the world.
That's one part of it, which is that I don't worry about it because the awareness part of it is already happening. But I do worry about the friction of people taking that awareness and converting it into actual doing in the climate world. And that's where Terra comes in yeah. So even though we are, a tech company and a tech plus company, but our we've always opened up everything that we have built.
So for example we've spent enormous amounts of time building what I think is the world's best curriculum on climate change and the opportunities associated with that. The vast majority of that is actually broken up into 15 minute modules and available on our app, so anybody in the world can download that, start getting up to speed on any topic in climate, and we update that on a weekly basis.
Same thing with job board, which is we are trying to make it as open access as possible. My focus as an entrepreneur is that, look, the climate crisis will take care of the awareness. The amount of capital that is coming into climate will take care of the opportunity part of it that people will not ignore it anymore because they're saying, [00:25:00] oh, another guy raised a hundred million for this thing, which I wasn't even paying attention.
A new fund, billion dollar fund started, or this country made a large net zero commitment, et cetera, et cetera. I think that'll get everyone's eyes and ears up. But I do worry about the friction for people taking that knowledge and now being able to do something with it as quickly as possible. So that's where our heads at
[00:25:22] Riddhi: and that's where Terra comes in. Great. Okay. I have one final question and then I'm gonna take a couple of questions that we have in the q and a box. Now as a global platform, I know there has people from all across the world, from the us, Europe India you probably have line of sight on, climate action and talent and most geographies.
What differences in similarities are you seeing arising across different geographies that are probably on different levels in their climate journey?
[00:25:47] Anshuman: Yeah, that's interesting. So I was actually just at a event at Stanford yesterday speaking along with another person from the Department of Energy here policymaker.
And I was actually thinking that, look it's pretty cool that [00:26:00] in the us the land of free markets, And in Stanford's business school, which is where capitalism is comes to host, you have now government officials, policy makers being front and center. So I think what's really remarkable in the US and Europe that I've seen is that Europe has always been a very regulation led economy and climate even more and that has prompted all kinds of Cottage industries on how to disclose your financial your climate risk, and so on and on, and all kinds of companies have come up. US has traditionally been a very market led economy, and in fact they pinch their nose at anything with that smells of big government.
And yet here we are. In 2023 where US has become industrial, muscular, industrial policy country throwing out 400 billion of incentives to anyone who's building anything in climate that's not smells so European. And here we are, America's doing that. And that's because I think everyone gets that.
We have this narrow time window in which stuff has to happen now. The thing that I see in the US is that we, [00:27:00] the country has invested in RD forever for a very long. Which means that there is all kinds of breakthrough stuff sitting inside labs that needs to be commercialized and that could potentially change everything from cement to aviation fuel to whatnot, right?
And all this industrial policy is helping that technology to come out of these labs to be commercialized as this thriving venture capital ecosystem that is able to pick that up and mash them up with founders and get them out to build large companies. I think therefore the kind of companies that I see here are ones that take a lot more technical risk.
So they are truly trying to build a new battery chemistry that if it fails, we'll exactly have zero value. But it's all the technologies where the risk is the markets are large and abundant. In India, for example, I see a lot of companies starting out with a which have a business model risk or adoption risk instead, there's less, much less a technical risk. And that's one difference in the ecosystem. I think the other thing which I've seen is that India for example, has a much broader definition of what climate means, and rightly if you look at the [00:28:00] US then climate often means carbon and then there are like a little bit things here, there on the.
But in India, I think we rightly think of it as water biodiversity, air pollution, and carbon and resources in general. So that broader understanding at one level is makes a whole ecosystem more diffuse. It feels where is our, I don't know, climate newsletter that captures everything in climate, and maybe Avaana should build that.
But or where is our fund that is the biggest climate fund and Avaana is of course that right now. So we need lot more of that. We need 10 Avaanas. But I think that diffusion, that climate means all these. I think this is actually, in my opinion, a more resilient definition of what climate change and climate opportunity really is because that connects very much to where each of these different economies are in the states of transition.
[00:28:46] Riddhi: Yeah, no, definitely makes sense. I think climate for India and for, most of the developing world, it can't just be carbon and energy. It has to be, it has to go beyond mitigation to also touch upon adaptation and resilience.[00:29:00] And yeah, hopefully we will see many more Avaanas come up.
But yeah. Thank you so much Anshuman, and I think that's pretty much all the questions that I had for you. And I'm gonna look at the questions that we have from the audience. And I'm gonna start with what a question on what signals have you seen that tell you that India is ready to embrace the climate economy?
So very India specific question.
[00:29:20] Anshuman: And a very good question there, and I've been racking my head over this for a long time as well. In fact, really probably will have a better answer than I would. Just to give you my perspective, I have been an angel investor in climate in India as well.
I about 20-25% of our user basis from India at Terra. So we, that's another way to see what's happening. And of course I've been. I'm rooting for ways to figure out how to jumpstart, how to accelerate what's happening with the climate economy in India. So I think where I see this is that if you look at the highest level you have now, A very significant NetZero commitment from a country that may not have done that, to be honest.
In fact if you look at what was happening at the [00:30:00] intergovernmental level for the longest time in climate debates, India and countries like India were talking about how the u unfairness of it all right, which is. Why shouldn't we get a chance to burn our coal to industrialize the way the Western world did?
And so what if it in the process actually puts more carbon into the atmosphere? Because that's just the fairness equation. Thankfully, in the past four to five years, it feels like we have turned the corner on that. And increasingly the mindset is of leap. Which is, look the US and developed economies, spent trillions of dollars putting out this oil and gas natural infrastructure pipelines, et cetera, et cetera, 2 trillion worth just in the US alone.
Why should we make that mistake? Just like we never did landlines, just like we never did credit cards, could we just jump to the next generation, especially with the kind of solar and wind potential that we have right now. So I see one that the language has changed and you see they put that kind of a support coming in and that kind of like political will also coming in on the climate side.
That's [00:31:00] one. I think at the other. I see some of the most incredible entrepreneurs who have done successfully really well in completely different sectors altogether, and know nothing about climate saying, I'm gonna figure it out. And I trust the judgment of these individuals who have built these businesses multiple times to figure their way out.
If we've already seen what's happening on the EV side I think the ev story in India is unlike any other story in any other part of the world. The two wheeler, three wheeler preponderance versus commercial versus cars and commercial vehicles. I think there's a lot happening there. I think a lot is actually under on the food and ag.
Both, the nature of the problem, the scale of the market that India has by itself, and the uniqueness of the solution that India can come up with for India and rest of the world is also feels like to me a bit of the, what happened with SaaS, right? So homegrown in India are built for the world.
I think there is something that will happen here in India in remarkable ways that'll go out into the rest of the world in a big way. So there are all these different. Having said that, these are still early days. Having said that to [00:32:00] me, it again feels like this is your era, but 1999 internet.
Where you could be building iconic companies that then stand the test of time, but you will be often at a Bangalore bar describing to someone what you're building and them looking at you and saying I didn't know that they were, are you a for-profit or a non-profit?
Like I get that by the way, a lot of times when I'm in India especially because not everyone has seen the scale of this opportunity. So maybe the balance that I'm trying to strike is to say it's a great question, idea, and think of this as almost an arbitrage opportunity, which is, I think there's under-appreciation of how big a deal this is gonna be very soon and already is to a certain extent.
So if you're deciding to jump in, I would jump in now and try to be at the ground at the ground.
[00:32:44] Riddhi: And we have a few questions from people from specific backgrounds that want to know how do their skills transfer. We have someone who's a lawyer who wants to know that are there enough lawyers focusing on the regulatory and structuring element of climate matters.
We have someone who wants to know about [00:33:00] transferability of. Skills from health tech to climate tech and then someone who's coming from the entertainment industry. And I think just the range of different backgrounds here just goes to show how much interest and how much scope there is. And I'm gonna maybe let you take all three at the same time.
[00:33:14] Anshuman: I appreciate it and thank you for all those questions. So yes. The answer is if you look at what's gonna happen in climate is that. A very large deployment problem. It's, in my opinion, a smaller innovation problem and a very large deployment problem right now, which is some of the biggest tech that we need to deploy is already here.
The is already very efficient. What you'll run into all the time is all kinds of regulatory and permitting and business issues. Just to give you an example, if you need to set up a large solar than in any part of the country right now, there is I would suspect that the technology guys are sitting in the back room.
They don't have much to do anymore. It's actually the legal guys and the business guys who are out there negotiating everything from land contracts to pre [00:34:00] power agreements, et cetera, et cetera. And that goes all the. From a policy standpoint, right? Which is what is Maharashtra's policy for how PPAs will function from now until eternity.
What is the national policy around that? So those are all places where I think regulation and legal skills are extremely required right now then within from the health space to climate space. So I think I wouldn't. Obviously climate and health has strong inter intersectionality, but so therefore you could potentially come up with an idea that at intersects at for both.
But I'm assuming that your personal identity and at least mine is often tied more to the functional skills that I know really well, but not the industry sector necessarily. So I think of myself as a tech product centric entrepreneur, and I can apply that to a variety of different problems.
And from your question, it seems like you have these functional skills which are business and product related. And I don't know if you're a product manager or something, but consumer behavior, Is potentially an interesting driver of how climate and sustainability is reached.
Just to give you an [00:35:00] example, food waste, right? So food waste is one of the largest causes of ghg emissions and one of the highest ROI in terms of a problem statement that you want to solve for. And it turns out that it has a lot of moving parts, but a big moving part is how do you, in. End customers or even retailers for that matter, to be a lot more thoughtful about how food gets wasted.
And it's as much technology as products, as user design and so on. So I think there's a lot to be done there. And Joshua your question about the entertainment industry media communication and journalism. I'll tell you this is that I spent. Inordinate amount of time the early days of Terra trying to get a climate journalism school started on top of Terra zero revenue value but incredible impact value if you were able to do that. And that's for a way different, very simple reason, which is if you look at what's broken among the some of the things that are broken one of them is that in India, for example, we often struggle to articulate why.
The [00:36:00] underpinning of a lot of our structural issues is actually what's happening with the climate crisis. For example, if you look at Maharashtra and if you see farmers suicides, it's such a tragedy. But that is not just to be laid at the doorstep of poverty. There is this undercurrent of of worsening droughts of per, and they're persistent.
And they're all exacerbated by what's happening with climate change all across the world. But nobody's told that. Someone has to stitch all these pieces together. So therefore there is that whole journalism angle, angle to it. But there's also, from a communication standpoint, I think there is this whole story, this narrative to be told about opportunity as opposed to crisis.
And that comes from not just talking about the funding rounds of the latest climate tech company that comes from just this very first principles investigation of where India is today and where India could be five years from now, 20 years from now. And somebody has to dig up that story and communicate in a way that everyone in the mainstream audience understands.
I would love it if I don't get this question in the US anymore, which is, are you a for-profit or not-for-profit. I wish that someone [00:37:00] from like a people, like folks from the communication world saw that challenge, that this is not just a do-gooder thing anymore. This is at the heart of business. This is the heart of cab competitive edges. It's at the heart of national security, all those different things. And we have to tell that story.
[00:37:14] Riddhi: Yeah. Definitely. I'm gonna take, okay. Who wants to know how do you see the hard tech companies becoming a part of Terra? What is the level of interaction you're seeing with Deep Tech?
[00:37:24] Anshuman: I think two parts to it. One is that, Obviously from a hiring standpoint, which is you should these companies should sign up for our employer partner program and recruit from Terra.
Cause you get exactly these kinda people who want to work in deep tech companies in climate. I think second is also that we are increasingly beginning to launch sprints or programs which are focused on skills which are deeper in the climate economy. For example, battery Chemistry. So you might see a program on terra four individuals who are looking to great quickly zoom into what's happening with new battery chemistry all across the world. So that's another and you could help [00:38:00] us build that. You could help us propagate that and get, and send your employees. That's one part.
[00:38:04] Riddhi: Amazing. Pretty much brings us to the end of this fireside chat and it's been a wonderful chat. Thank you so much an once again for taking the time out. Any closing remarks from your part?
[00:38:15] Anshuman: No. First of all, thank you for having me really. And. I'm a big fan of how Avaana is approaching this in completely holistic manner as a thank you. I'm trying to be as sanguine about saying this, but guys, this is the biggest opportunity. I've never seen anything like this in my life. So please jump into climate. You'll never see this combination of profit and purpose again, this is just incredible. So take a deeper look at it and find your. Yeah,
[00:38:42] Riddhi: I feel like you were very calm while saying that. It seems like you actually wanna be shouting it from the rooftops.
That's right. Make a t-shirt.
Definitely. Let's make those. We'll hand those out at our next event. But great. Thank you so much Anshuman.
[00:38:55] Anshuman: Thanks Riddhi