Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
One of the best-performing venture investors in history is back in the saddle. And this time, he’s bringing the stampede to invest in some of the most consequential companies of our time.
For
Chris Sacca, the seeds of investing in energy were sown 23 years ago when he was building data centers for Google.
His investing career went into full bloom with Lowercase Capital, the venture firm he founded in 2010 with $8.4M in capital. Thanks to early investments in Uber, Twitter, Stripe, Instagram, Blue Bottle Coffee, Docker, Optimizely, and others, Lowercase’s first fund returned over 204x DPI and around 250x MOIC.
For his second act, he is going bigger to solve massive problems that require real solutions across energy, power, water, AI, transmission, and nuclear fusion.
He and his wife, Crystal, co-founded
Lowercarbon Capital (and are the firm’s largest LPs) to invest in companies that own every part of the electrical stack, from sunlight to socket.
Chris and Crystal have built out a stellar team to match the opportunity in front of them by bringing together the requisite ingredients to be an expert and differentiated investor in energy, advanced manufacturing, nuclear fusion, and transmission. General Partner
Clay Dumas was previously Chief of Staff in the White House Office of Digital Strategy. The firm’s most recent General Partner to join the ranks is
Caie Kelley, who leads the firm’s Growth investing efforts. Caie brings to bear a background in private equity at Permira and investing in climate startups at Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and output so considerable that the Lowercarbon team calls her “CaieGPT,” despite that output being human-generated.
Irrespective of political regime, geopolitical chokepoints, and supply chain reconfiguration, the world was in dire need of better, faster, safer, cheaper, and cleaner energy alternatives.
Chris, Clay, Caie and team at Lowercarbon set out to invest in new energy and manufacturing companies that could become the foundation of the new energy economy when Lowercarbon launched in 2021. In that time, national security, energy security, geopolitical tensions, reorienting of supply chains, and a hotter earth have all undergone seismic shifts. Lowercarbon has invested across the energy stack to back companies addressing these challenges and building the foundation of the new economy.
There’s a lot to play for here on Earth, as Chris noted in the podcast, saying, “Mars is for quitters. If we are going to Mars, we are giving up on what we have here.”
And what we have here is what this fascinating conversation with Chris and Caie focused on. We covered:
- Why climate may not be the best way to describe Lowercarbon’s investing activities.
- How big is the energy market?
- Why Lowercarbon avoids investing in “science projects.”
- What it takes to underwrite investing in hardware and hard tech companies.
- How Lowercarbon unearths “fundamentally different technologies that are providing fundamentally different costs,” according to Caie.
- Lessons learned from Lowercase and how to know when to bet big on an investment.
- Why the likes of Antora, Crux, Fuse Energy, Base Power, Panthalassa, Cloover, Solar Square, Commonwealth Fusion, Emerald AI, and more could be such consequential companies.
- Why the Lowercarbon team are “unapologetic capitalists.”
Bios
Caie Kelley, General Partner
Caie is a General Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, where she focuses primarily on growth stage opportunities and provides a quantitative lens to the team’s deep tech and science-backed work. Prior to Lowercarbon, she was at SOUNDWaves, the climate-focused venture arm of Sound Ventures, where she built out the team’s sustainability strategy, helped raise the fund’s first external capital, and backed founders at multiple stages of growth across batteries, alternative materials, circularity, and climate software.
Prior to Sound, Caie was at Permira, an $80b private equity fund based in New York, where she focused on technology and industrial services growth-stage businesses. Caie started her career in the technology investment banking group at JP Morgan in both San Francisco and New York, where she advised IPO-ready companies on how to graduate to the “real world” (public markets).
Caie holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and where she wrote a very, very long thesis on Southeast Asia and first became painfully aware of the disparate effects of climate change on developing parts of the world. Caie grew up in the Bay Area with two biologists as parents but is now a Southern California loyalist — she currently lives in Los Angeles where she spends her free time consuming reality television and staying up to date with pop culture discourse, and going on flat walks in the sun with friends.
Chris Sacca, Founder & Managing Partner
Chris is the co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital, backing the world’s most ambitious and scalable decarbonization solutions across energy, industrial materials, transportation, carbon removal, and advanced manufacturing. The portfolio spans countless companies, each proving to the world that hard-tech climate solutions are just good business.
Alongside his wife, Crystal, Chris also co-founded Lowercase Capital, best known for its very early investments in Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Twilio, Docker, Optimizely, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Stripe, making it one of the most successful venture funds in history.
The performance of the Lowercase funds vaulted Chris to the number-two spot on the Forbes Midas List and landed him a place on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list before he shifted in 2017 from broad-based venture capital to focus on climate innovation, philanthropy, and creative pursuits.
Before becoming an investor, Chris served as Head of Special Initiatives at Google, where he founded and co-led the Access division. His projects included Google’s multi-billion-dollar initiatives for the 700MHz and TV white-spaces spectrum, culminating in Google’s $4.7 billion bid in the FCC spectrum auction. Chris oversaw billions of dollars of global energy projects and co-led the siting and acquisition of groundbreaking data centers in Oregon, Georgia, and the Netherlands. Chris helped expand the company’s global fiber-optic and undersea cable footprint, drove many of Google’s business development and M&A transactions, and was a founding team member of the company’s New Business Development division. In recognition of his accomplishments, Chris was among the first Google employees ever to receive the Google Founders’ Award, the company’s highest internal honor.
Earlier in his career, Chris practiced law at Fenwick & West, representing startups, venture firms, and multinational corporations in financings, M&A, and licensing deals, and later held executive roles, including General Counsel and Head of Corporate Development, at one of the world’s largest streaming and digital media companies, Speedera Networks, later acquired by Akamai.
For almost 20 years, Chris has been a fixture on television, radio, podcasts, in magazines and newsprint, and across social media. He joined the cast of Shark Tank for two Emmy Award-winning seasons and has appeared as himself on the ABC series Alex, Inc., and on Showtime’s Billions. Chris has been featured on major business and news television shows around the world and has been interviewed for a multitude of print articles and podcasts on investing, entrepreneurship, culture, and the future of technology and AI.
Chris graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a member of The Tax Lawyer law review and was honored as a Philip A. Ryan and Ralph J. Gilbert Memorial Scholar. He also graduated cum laude from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he majored in Humanities in International Affairs and was both an Edmund Evans Memorial Scholar and a Weeks Family Foundation Scholar.
During his studies, Chris attended universities in Ecuador, Ireland, and Spain, and worked in El Salvador while in law school. Long before any of that, beginning in seventh grade, Chris attended night school at the State University of New York at Buffalo for six years of college mathematics, where he discovered that technology, computers, and innovation would become lifelong passions.
He is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, served as an Associate Fellow of the Saïd Business School at Oxford University and an MIT Enterprise Forum Global Trustee, and was named to the Atlantic Council Vanguard 25. Chris is also a Trustee of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Foundation, the team that puts the “Team” in Team USA.
Chris lives with Crystal and their three daughters in Montana. When not working to unfuck the planet, Chris is an avid alpine and Nordic skier, kitesurfer, recovering Ironman triathlete, average-proficiency crossword puzzler, beginner guitarist trying to keep up with his kids, intermittent helicopter pilot, underwhelming pickleball player, collage and found-materials artist, and once bicycled coast-to-coast across the United States.
Thanks, Chris and Caie, for sharing your wisdom, expertise, and passion about investing in energy.
Show Notes00:00 Welcome to the Alt Goes Mainstream Podcast
01:48 A Message from Ultimus Fund Solutions
02:52 Climate Week Kickoff
03:26 Chris Sacca’s Background
06:04 Caie Kelley’s Path to Lowercarbon
10:00 Avoiding “Science Projects”
12:46 Underwriting Hardware
17:27 Panthalassa Case Study
20:54 Project Finance and Debt
22:28 Arbor Turbine Bottlenecks
26:00 How Big Is Energy Market?
30:25 Fusion And Dual Use
32:45 Giga Transformers Story
35:46 Permissionless Investing
40:08 Resilience As Opportunity
44:15 Narrative And Messaging
45:12 Stop Shaming Consumers
45:36 Pragmatic Pro Energy Pitch
47:19 Optimism And Storytelling
50:09 Making Projects Bankable
53:52 Investor Education Shift
57:59 Portfolio Lightning Round
A Word from Our Sponsor, UltimusThis episode of Alt Goes Mainstream is brought to you by
Ultimus, the full-service fund administrator and transfer agent powering asset managers in private and public markets. As alts go mainstream, you need real expertise to handle complex fund structures, connect with key distribution partners, and handle sophisticated compliance, reporting, and transparency demands.
That’s Ultimus: high-tech, high-touch solutions for over 450 clients and 2,500 funds with $775B in assets under administration. Backed by an expert team of over 1,200 employees, they place client service at the core of their business, helping you navigate complexity during your fund structuring or launch and then supporting you through every stage of growth. Whether you’re already in the market or thinking about entering private wealth, you can trust their team’s deep expertise in retail alternatives to help you reach your goals.
We thank Ultimus for their support of alts going mainstream.