The World’s Largest Climate Tech Accelerator on How We Innovate

We sat down with The Accelerator Guy! That's Ryan Kushner of course - co-founder of Third Derivative, the world's largest climate tech accelerator. For context, Third Derivative is a non-profit joint venture of RMI and New Energy Nexus and the world’s largest and most resourced climate technology accelerator. The global, 18-month accelerator program coordinates commercialization between corporate partners (Wells Fargo, Microsoft, AT&T, Berkshire Hathaway Energy), 15 venture capital partners, and their portfolio of 198 startups, who have raised over $1.5B.

We start by discussing Ryan's background and book, "Accelerate This: A Super Not Boring Guide to Startup Accelerators and Clean Energy Entrepreneurship," while exploring key themes in climate technology, startup innovation, and the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Heard of "start-up valleys of death?" Ryan knows them well. The conversation highlights the importance of refining startup pitches, the societal adoption of technologies, and the challenges of transitioning entire energy systems, including the role of nuclear energy and grid integration. Finally, we also get into our personal motivations stemming from childhood pollution experiences and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on air quality, fostering a sense of optimism about a future driven by clean energy and the necessity for justice in this transition.

Referenced in this conversation:
Do Not NOT Use this Pitch Format - Medium
Volts Podcast - Learning Curves
RMI Cleantech Revolution 

Third Derivative Blog - The Power of 83

Connect with Ryan Kushner:
Ryan's Website and Full Bio 

Linkedin

Creators & Guests

Host

Greg Robinson

Husband. Dad. Working to make basic needs not so basic..

Producer

Flo Lumsden

Audio and Video producer. Owner of #chorusstudios

What is The World Changing Podcast?

Join us as we talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. Hosted by Greg Robinson and Flo Lumsden, an Aston podcast produced by Chorus Studios.


00:02
Greg Robinson
Welcome to the World Changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much, but let's keep it. We'll keep it.

00:12
Ryan Kushner
Anyway.

00:12
Greg Robinson
How about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, then we can take that out. Welcome to the World changing podcast, where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards decentralized and carbon free future. We'll talk to the skeptics, supporters and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company. And on the other side of the camera here we have Flo Lumpsen, our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this. So, Ryan Kushner, on this episode, he was the co founder of Third Derivative, which is the world's largest and most resourced climate tech accelerator, which is part of Rocky Mountain Institute.

01:05
Greg Robinson
He's also the author of accelerate this, a super not boring guide to startup accelerators and clean energy entrepreneurship. Subject matter expert innovation structures, think incubators, accelerators, venture studios, prize programming, he lectures on the topic of climate and exponential pace of climate innovation at Singularity University. In the episode, we talked about technology hype cycles. This is kind of a new, put in a new frame for me, technology learning curves. So the idea that lots of people were afraid of electricity when it came out, and how long does it take the society to feel comfortable with a certain type of innovation, to just embrace it? And then we talked about everyone's favorite topic, startup valleys of death, how to navigate those when you're bringing new technology to market. So this was a super fun conversation.

02:00
Greg Robinson
That's all I got to enjoy it as much as, yeah, as much as we did. Climate has always been this tricky thing because when I first got into it, which I think you and I kind of got into it around the same time, the first slide, your problem slide was like, the world is burning humanity's ending. I have a solution. So problem was end of humanity. Solution was whatever you dual access, solar tracker, or solution wise, whatever you were doing. And I'm just curious, like, of all your time and climate, if you're working on accelerators, you're working with these companies, how much do you dissuade or how much do you push people into focusing on the sort of existential crisis is the problem we're solving? Because I think as a mission driven entrepreneur, you can be driven towards that.

02:53
Greg Robinson
But there's not like a market price for this destruction.

02:59
Ryan Kushner
It's hilarious, right? Because you have the entire world is on fire, humanity is going to end, and with these two gears going like this, we're going to save it all. And so the cognitive dissonance around the scale is kind of hilarious. It's obviously important to talk about the big picture, but I don't even look at it when I'm looking at decks from startups, even on our own deck, that we present we as third derivative, we're working on the big picture. So I feel like we need to acknowledge the scope of the issue that we're addressing. But for individual enterprises, I'm like, just go right to the problem that you're solving. The change within the scope of the sort of obligatory larger, larger mission, I think is not needed.

03:47
Ryan Kushner
So if you like, one of the resources that I've made is sort of my take on the sequoia capital deck. It's on medium. It's called do not use this pitch format. It's like problem solution. It's just very stripped down and there's no slide for meta problem. It's just like, what are you doing? And the people that you're pitching to are just as smart as you. In my case, always smarter. And so let them connect the dots. Just kind of get to it, is how I feel. It is funny, though, you could do like a whole SNL skit around it, basically.

04:28
Flo Lumsden
Around whether or not to bring up climate.

04:31
Ryan Kushner
Just to talk about. Yes. Well, to talk about the bigger, you know, predictions of global sea level rise. If you're not working on water or.

04:40
Flo Lumsden
Something, that would be a really good SNL skit. Actually, I think we should pitch that.

04:47
Greg Robinson
Yeah, yeah. It's like, unless you're scooping water out at a certain rate.

04:53
Ryan Kushner
Yeah.

04:54
Greg Robinson
And putting it somewhere else, then maybe. But yeah, probably stay away from that. We had Mark Jacobson on the podcast and he talks very publicly about carbon capture, like direct air capture and the technology around that, and he's largely unsupportive of it. It's probably like the understatement of the century to say he's largely unsupportive of it.

05:20
Ryan Kushner
What's Mark's solution for getting the trillion and a half tons of extra CO2 in the air?

05:29
Greg Robinson
Out of the air, I think he says trees. I think that's his number one CO2 sequestration device. It's trees. He didn't say this on the podcast, but let's just expand that to greenery, soil, things that sequester carbon down into the soil. Have you worked with companies in that space that are solving that? What is the process? Or in your view, what is your favorite one or ones you've worked with where you're like, oh, that could really work, where the rate is high enough and the sequential is high enough. You're not just saving a couple round trip flights with a hundred million dollar project or something.

06:08
Ryan Kushner
We're sort of in like inning two of nine of figuring out the most likely CDR pathways, carbon dioxide removal. It needs to happen. So can trees do it? There's a physicality to the question. With all of the extra carbon that's in the air, it's a physical amount and weighs a physical amount. It's roughly a trillion half tons. And I think we have to take out 10 billion a year by 2050 to get back to concentrations of CO2 that are sort of normal pre industrial. I always think of Tom Chi from at one ventures. He talks about it as a mass transfer problem, as in, there is a mass of physical molecules that needs to go somewhere. I just don't know if there's enough. A tree has as much carbon as is in a tree.

07:05
Ryan Kushner
And so I don't know if that is the total solution, just based on the physical mass of that and the fact that then they degrade and put it back. So there needs to be, in my opinion, something more permanent and very large. The things I think are interesting that we're just figuring out just in terms of direct error capture. It's great because it can go anywhere. And the general process is that there's some kind of absorbance material and that absorbs the CO2 or bonds it to something, and then you dispose of that physical mass. And what's exciting is that people have been doing this for a while and it's getting cheaper and people are innovating like crazy. I sort of look at everything happening in clean energy, transportation, building materials, industrial decarbonization. There's so much happening.

07:58
Ryan Kushner
It's like the cambrian explosion of clean everything, and it's all happening now. And there are so many bright ideas and amazing startups that are just on the cusp of massive scalability. So it's very exciting. That's absolutely true. In direct air capture, it's getting cheaper and faster, and people are now exploring other ways to do it. There's weatherization. That's interesting, using natural geological processes, and also using the ocean as a sink to basically create materials effectively, like synthetic limestone, things that would be inert and in the ocean. And so a bunch of companies doing this. One of our companies captures six takes wastewater, pulls the carbon out, makes clean water, and sequesters carbon dioxide. So multiple benefits. And that's just so interesting. And I think all of the.

08:54
Ryan Kushner
We're just sort of finding out what are the places in the system where hopefully, profitably, companies can do this. I don't think that we're going to charity our way out of all of the carbon in the air. I think we need businesses that operate without carbon credits and without donations, basically. And so, to me, that's the holy Grail, is figuring out what are the downstream products that can be sold that pay for the process.

09:27
Greg Robinson
That was big. Part of my other questions were around businesses that are selling a product I loved. In one of the decks you sent over, there was a whole part about learning curves, which it seems like you could do an entire podcast on this concept of learning curves. And so, just for listeners, the learning curves are basically like, well, why don't you say it? What is the learning curve?

09:54
Ryan Kushner
And I thank you for bringing up, because it's. It's one of the few places where technology and mysticism come together. There is a creepy amount of consistency to a learning curve which is within a technology. Solar as its own technology, wind its own technology, battery storage. So you pick your vertical, as it were. And fairly predictably, things get cheaper over time. And there's a bunch of different ways. There's, like, Swanson's law and Moore's law. Everything kind of converges to, as you build something, it gets cheaper. And that happens, but it happens or doesn't happen very consistently over time.

10:42
Ryan Kushner
And so the podcast and the report that I mentioned in that deck is this report that David Roberts, on the Volts podcast, did with an author who looked at, over time, tens and hundreds of various technologies and saw that there was this strange and very consistent rate of things getting cheaper. And so the question is, why? Why is solar locked into relatively this rate of progress? And it's a bit mysterious and a bit strange. And so that's just kind of cool, but it's nice that it's predictable because you can say, like, over here, we're going to go there, so we're going to base our investments, our technology, our deployment, looking at that sort of end product.

11:30
Greg Robinson
Yeah. Yeah. So the thing that I found so fascinating was just looking at the learning curves of other things, like iron to steel.

11:38
Ryan Kushner
Yes.

11:39
Greg Robinson
And so that whole concept. So you have the learning curve, which is what you just mentioned about if it's Swanson's law or Moore's law, which is just like, things get cheaper, but there's also just like a rate of adoption. And maybe it's, maybe it all has to do with cost, but just based on watching other technologies get adopted, even in our, just in our time of being alive, not even these macro trends where you're looking at all the way back to electricity being adopted, but if you just look at the things like mobile technology or cloud computing or Internet or any of those types of rates of adoption, there's also just like, a societal learning. So many other things have to go with it. Not just it getting cheaper, but people have to feel comfortable with it.

12:23
Greg Robinson
People have to not be afraid of electricity anymore. People have to be. And there was so many advertisements at the beginning of electricity saying, like, don't do this.

12:32
Ryan Kushner
Right?

12:32
Greg Robinson
This is scary.

12:33
Ryan Kushner
I can totally imagine being that person at that time, being like, forget electricity. That is, that is crazy. Especially if you saw, like, Edison shocking. Killing the elephant somebody. I'm done. Like, yeah, exactly.

12:48
Greg Robinson
I know. I would have been at the party being like, don't do it. I'm sure there was those conspiracy theories, you know, of like, oh, this is going to be a disaster. And in some ways, it is a disaster. Like, however long a product has been in service, it can be tested, it can have its mistakes, it can get its kinks ironed out, and it can be, it almost prepares for scale. But that was what was so fascinating about this idea of things get cheaper. So as it gets cheaper, people adopt it because it starts to become a suitable, like, steel becomes a suitable alternative to iron.

13:19
Ryan Kushner
Mm.

13:20
Greg Robinson
Maybe that's just because of cost, but the means of production has to get.

13:24
Flo Lumsden
Ubiquitous, you know, basically economies of scale.

13:28
Greg Robinson
Economies of scale. But people have to become comfortable. Like, if you're building a product or you're building bridges, let's say, you know, or you're some kind of infrastructure builder, if you've spent your whole life understanding the properties of iron, and then somebody comes along with steel, there's also just like, a mental shift that has to happen from the deployment or the developers, or they all have to be replaced, because maybe you can't make. Maybe the iron, the people using iron can't make the transition.

13:57
Ryan Kushner
I think that's what makes learning curves so interesting is because as far as I understand, that is the meta of everything. It incorporates all of the heebie jeebie, societal adoption, regulatory mishmash. You can imagine. It all boils up into that. That's the metal layer of, you take that all together and you get these consistent curves over time. Even still, just to put it out there, I'm not sure if you guys have seen this, but I think it's called the electron wars. It's a PBS documentary about early electricity, Tesla and Westinghouse versus Edison, and I think JP Morgan.

14:35
Greg Robinson
JP Morgan, yeah, exactly. Right.

14:37
Ryan Kushner
And, like, battling out for. Who would be, would it be ac or DC? That's AC DC. And it was just complete, all out warfare. And what I was referencing earlier is that Edison, to prove that AC was dangerous, they shocked and killed an elephant in front of a crowd.

14:57
Greg Robinson
Mm. Another one of the things you had on the learning curve was sailing to steamships.

15:02
Ryan Kushner
Mm.

15:02
Greg Robinson
And there's another, I mean, the Cornelius Vanderbilt biography goes through the wars. This was competition back then was like, let me show you why this product is so dangerous. And then in the sailing to steamships, Cornelius Vanderbilt was a big part of that. And they would, like, literally sink each other's ships with people on them. Like, it was just like, oh, like, I out competed you because I sunk your ship. And it's like everything as these technologies were being adopted, they're also being fought, like, by these other competitors. You just see it over and over. You see it now where it's like you almost can't trust the opposition because you don't really know where the opposition is coming from. Like, if the opposition to solar is it, like, there's a lot of just physics reasons that solar is tricky as a standalone technology.

15:56
Greg Robinson
It's like, if we use iron to steel or sailing to steamships or coal to gas or horses to cars. Like, those are all technology shifts or product shifts that really, truly replace the other one. Like, the car could replace the horse and buggy entirely. It wasn't like we gave you some wounds wheels, and you still have to cobble it together. So solar is not a whole solution. Solar panels are not a whole solution to replace the alternative. Like, solar doesn't replace coal, solar doesn't replace gas. And so I think that's been an interesting dynamic as well as, like, it's easy to look backwards and say, oh, this whole car replaced this horse and buggy, but the internal combustion engine as an alone as a technology, could not replace the horse because it was just an internal combustion engine.

16:46
Greg Robinson
Hey, get all the other parts right. They had to get the mass manufacturing of a car. I think we're in this really interesting place where everybody's sort of picking out a piece of this whole solution and saying, oh, I'm the long duration storage group, or I'm the carbon sequestration group, but I'm also the clean water group, you know, at the same time. So my question, you think of the technology adoption cycle or these learning curves, does every single one of these technologies, every type of long duration storage, whether it's compressed CO2 or thermal batteries or whatever, do they all have to go through that learning curve, do you think?

17:21
Ryan Kushner
Yeah, I think we're sort of getting, like, a little bit outside of my realm of knowledge.

17:27
Greg Robinson
We'll go with philosophy then.

17:29
Ryan Kushner
Yeah, but a learning curve, let's say, okay, the paper is true, they did all the math and all these solutions, but how finely do you slice it? Are thermal batteries their own learning curve, or is long duration storage? My sense is that it comes down to a repeatable manufacturing process with whatever inputs go into that. And solar panels are one thing, because roughly, they're pretty similar how they work. I would imagine that long duration storage is too wide of a birth to really talk about it because it's so different. And how you make a thermal battery like Antora or someone is different and probably has its own learning curve than energy dome, which is one of other companies, which is CO2 filled, sort of pressurized domes, I think those are different because the process is so different.

18:25
Ryan Kushner
I think of it as like, there are factories all over the world making a, like, product, and they're always looking at each other and competing, and someone's making slight innovations, and it's copied, and so that's what bubbles up into it. But different kinds of long duration storage are so different. Like a gravity battery, it's a different ball of wax. So I think those get their own sort of slice of things. But what I was thinking about, when you're talking about the rate of change and the resistance to that, tell me if you're the same way, guys. But when I'm saying no to something or no, I don't believe that, I'm also questioning myself, because I'm like, am I that person back in history that didn't like electricity or whatever it is?

19:10
Ryan Kushner
And so when I have conversations around things that I'm not sure are going to happen, I'm always sort of, like, checking myself. Do you find yourself in a similar place around things that you're saying no to? Because students of history know that people are wrong.

19:32
Greg Robinson
People are wrong? Yeah. I'm curious. Your thoughts flow on that. Since we've been doing this podcast, you've been coming up your own learning curve as we've been doing this. So like, what are your thoughts on things you maybe originally thought you didn't agree with?

19:45
Flo Lumsden
Or can you give me a specific?

19:48
Greg Robinson
Yeah, let's use nuclear.

19:50
Flo Lumsden
I typically hold off on having strong opinions until I feel like I know more. Once I get to know a topic and all the different pros and cons of it, I will come up with a stronger opinion. So through learning about it, I've come up with a stronger opinion and my opinion is that it's awesome and we shouldn't stop developing it. It could be so great in 15 to 20 years, but it's not going to be the fastest, best solution for replacing fossil fuels in the next three to five years. So in that way, I wouldn't take funds away from existing solutions that are already cheap and scalable to a degree, to just only focus on nuclear. I think that would be a mistake.

20:41
Greg Robinson
Yeah, yeah. I always try to ask myself like what would I need to hear to make me change my mind so that I'm being very clear about why I have a firm stance on something like if I heard the SMRs were going to take ten years to get permitted, even if the technology was all working, and when it finally comes out, it's going to be twenty cents a kilowatt hour, that would be enough for me to be like, no, like, that needs to, I need to get that out of my mind. I think what's really cool about the SMRs and a lot of these technologies is like the idea of being able to bring them into an energy mix and being able to like replace it. I think it's very interesting. SMRs have this challenge of capacity factor any technology does.

21:30
Greg Robinson
Everything in the energy business is like you want to be able to come out and say it's going to have this much uptime, I can insure it. It's guaranteed, no mistakes. It's like, well, it's not actually how innovation works. So you actually had another point. The startup valleys of death, which forming the startup, going through this product development cycle, getting market validation and then making it scalable, making it a profitable delivery.

21:55
Greg Robinson
And as I read those, it's like, how much naivety do you have to have as a startup founder to look those in the face and be like, I got this is going to be great, especially in climate where it's like I'm going to do this thermal battery and I'm going to get through not only formation, I'm going to get my product development right, I'm going to, the market's going to validate me somehow and I'm going to get a distribution channel in this ossified industry. The thing we thought about 15 years ago was like death by pilot, where it's like you just get stuck in this product development sort of research cycle where you've done your fifth pilot with a giant utility company, or even worse, you get stuck with a single customer because that single customer believes in your technology.

22:40
Greg Robinson
And then all of a sudden it's like you don't even have capacity to scale up beyond this customer. I think this challenge of going from innovation to deployment, this isn't really an industry where you get to fail a bunch of times. Like you don't get to go to market and fail with your product several times and have the market still be like, oh, we're good with you being here. So I'm curious about as you think about those startup values of death, like how do these companies, these hard tech companies get through that product development cycle where they get this chance to come out and say I'm going to get 95% capacity factor, but they only get 60? Do they get another swing? Do they get another at bat?

23:25
Ryan Kushner
Good question. And it's funny you said naivete, bravery. It takes a whole, you know, just self interest and economic upside. Ideally you get some shots on gold and you can make a mistake, but not always. You can die on the vine by going down the wrong road and then not getting another chance. That's not great. So you want to obviously make your best stab at it, but then stay alive as you iterate and change your focus. And it's hard and complex, but I think part of what we do as a program and doing pattern recognition around innovation in startups is doing lean startup methodology. You know, just doing cheap tests before you even deploy, you know, doing the product market fit by just talking to a lot of people like old school, sort of like y combinator methodology.

24:25
Ryan Kushner
As a program we try to build in as much of a soft cushion as possible where make that best guess and then also have partners that will give you honest feedback and real data so you can pivot as quickly as possible. The other way to look at this too is speaking of like thermal storage. And I mentioned Antora earlier of what I understand of their origin story is you're saying how do you have the bravery to sort of go for it? And their methodology was we know that storage is going to be needed, we're going to make the cheapest storage possible, how do we do it? What is the cheapest materials? How can the round trip efficiency be as high as possible?

25:06
Ryan Kushner
We're going to use something really freaking cheap, like blocks of carbon, and we can come in, assume the same reliability and uptime and everything. If we come in as cheaper, we win a, and we will get contracts. So I think that adds some confidence around it. I remember hearing an interview with the founder of Proterra a long time ago, and I was like, electric buses? But he was like, here is the math. Scheduled regular routes, charging savings. Like, okay, that made sense. So just doing that sort of like first principles, back of the napkin, like, does this make sense? In theory, yeah.

25:46
Greg Robinson
To completely demystify this, you're just talking about businesses. Like you said before, there's no tricks. Like, you gotta save people time, you gotta save people money, like not too many others. You gotta make people. There's some fundamental things, like if you're b, two b, you better be saving time or money in some way. If it's consumer like, you better be giving people status or belonging or something. You know, it's just fundamental human psychology. And who would have thought blocks of carbon would have the same? It sounds like that's all the same. You did say one thing I wanted to just touch on again before, which was companies have to be able to scale without carbon credits and without donations. How do these companies like direct air capture others? Like, are they transforming the mass that they're capturing into some product that they're then selling?

26:42
Greg Robinson
Or how do those types of solutions, or carbon sequestration, or even just nature based solutions? Like, how do you see those business models working?

26:58
Ryan Kushner
Depends on the company. Many companies in the space work on credits. And I think that's there will always be some market for credits, and that's great. And you want that for offsetting flights, industrial emissions. As far as I understand, the scale of what needs to happen is so much bigger than what the voluntary market can bear, or any market, really. And so I'm a little over my skis in terms of this, but yeah, that's a thing.

27:32
Greg Robinson
Always interested in kind of people's just philosophies or opinions. Because I think this industry, again, you already said the best businesses that are going to win are going to save time and they're going to save money. And that to me has been from the beginning of getting into clean energy. It was, even if I have my own personal views, that's not why this is going to win. Clean energy is a technology. Technology gets cheaper, technology at scale gets even cheaper and cheaper. And cheaper. And so if you and commodities don't. Right, and commodities don't.

28:10
Ryan Kushner
One thing I want to mention, getting back to the study about learning curves is I think mentioned in that study is that by their calculation, fossil fuels have never gotten cheaper. Like a gallon of fuel is pretty much the same as it has been relatively since we started pulling like oil out of the ground in Pennsylvania. Right. It's hasn't gotten cheaper. It's just a commodity. The processes around it to transport it and refine it obviously get way more efficient, but it hasn't gotten cheaper. And so no one's expecting fuels to have a breakthrough because it's a commodity. And so to your point, I think that's why to me, it's just inevitable that clean energy will win because clean energy is a technology, many technologies, and it's going to get cheaper and it's already winning.

29:11
Ryan Kushner
The article you can post that I wrote for our blog is just in the calendar year 2023, more energy was added to the world's grids. What percentage of just that new energy was renewable?

29:25
Greg Robinson
Flo, you go first.

29:28
Flo Lumsden
I think I've done this quiz with Ryan before.

29:30
Ryan Kushner
Yes, exactly.

29:31
Flo Lumsden
I have a feeling it's around 20% to 30% or might be higher.

29:38
Greg Robinson
I say 90.

29:41
Ryan Kushner
That's the spread. Greg is closer. So at the end of the year, we thought it was 83%. It's now been revised up to 85%. And if you look at the graph, it goes up every year fairly steadily. Right. And so we're getting to the point where the replacement rate is close to 100%. And that's happening because it is cheaper, it's a technology, and it's going to continue to get cheaper. And obviously there's storage and capacity factor so on and so forth, but just that as its own number is. Wow.

30:17
Greg Robinson
Yeah. Well, it gets to that point before about the idea of going from horses to cars. It wasn't just the internal combustion engine, it was like the internal combustion engine and all of the other components that were required to make a full solution that would replace a horse. And I think that being able to get clean energy to the point where we have firm power and not even just 24/7 matching, by the way, like 24/7 if you talk to these utility companies that are facing this data center boom, even 24/7 matching of renewables somewhere kind of in your grid vicinity is not what we have to do as utilities. We have to firm this electricity and make sure that all of those components are perfect to keep your lights on.

31:03
Greg Robinson
Until clean energy provides that entire solution, we don't get to call it like horses to cars yet. Like, we still need all of those other parts. And I think the folks like intora and folks like, you know, who are doing all these other pieces, components. Those components are so critical because at the end of the day, we all need firm electricity. I think since I've been in renewables has kind of got to be this financial market over here that was a little bit independent of the physics market, like the physical electron firm power market. And the utilities were like, okay, we're going to add this and we're going to adopt it as we can. But demand was flat. Now we're at this reckoning moment, which is awesome. I mean, incredible that we're there, which is now renewables has to become the equivalent.

31:51
Greg Robinson
No more financial games or donations or credits or anything. I don't know which part of the macro valleys of death we're on, but we're using. Suppose this is a question. We're using technologies that are not new, like blocks of carbon. It's not like a new concept. Why do you think that's happening now?

32:12
Ryan Kushner
I think the main thing is that the concept of battery storage is pretty new. There was no storage on grids whatsoever until ten years ago. We're pretty early in the process, and it's been lithium ionization gotten so cheap and has become huge, and now we're exploring other avenues, and so it's just sort of new. And that's why it's really interesting right now, because we're experimenting and we're understanding the demand is there. This is sort of the learning curve of lithium ion. These are the characteristics of it, what can beat it. So that's kind of what's happening, and then longer seasonal storage and things like different things, battery storage with different characteristics, all into this sort of Frankenstein thing that is our grid.

33:14
Flo Lumsden
I have a question.

33:16
Ryan Kushner
Yeah, fly.

33:17
Flo Lumsden
Okay, so Ryan is this amazing accelerator guru, and he runs third derivative. So, I wanted to ask you about the grid more specifically. What percentage do you think of your cohorts are grid augmenting or somehow related to the grid?

33:40
Ryan Kushner
I'm going to say offhand about. I'm just thinking of our presentation and our industries. I think sort of electricity and grid is about 30%.

33:51
Flo Lumsden
Oh, that's pretty. That's more than I expected. Greg, I was going to go ahead and ask one of my questions that you and I talked about before. I'm just curious because we've done some episodes about how monolithic and complicated. A lot of the utilities are, and how oftentimes they're not always so incentivized to innovate because it might not be seen as profitable for them. And there's no competition. And the challenge is inherent with that. So what are your experiences with deployment of some of these startups that do need to integrate with the grid or utilities?

34:24
Ryan Kushner
It's very local or very utility based. The first accelerator I worked with was energy accelerator, became elemental accelerator based in Hawaii. And that was really helped because there was a mandate and Heco had to play along. There was a mandate. Other programs that I've been part of and help create, like free electrons, international progressive electric, for some reason they are forced generally to become less complacent and innovate, maybe because there's deregulation, there's competition, like Fukushima. Because of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the japanese government basically made residential competition a thing so people could be gen tailors. And so external factors, regulatory changes that allow entrance into it.

35:23
Ryan Kushner
Here in San Francisco, as long as I've been doing this business, a locus of energy innovation, Pijini has never been that great at playing along with startups and having an innovation sandbox, a place to, like were speaking about, right? To experiment, make mistakes, plug in. I was just back in Pittsburgh and I went to, there's an energy innovation center there, and the local utility, Duquesne Light, has a huge room where it's like a grid, where it's like high transmissions all in there, because they're wanting to experiment and they have a whole decarbonization track, and a lot is going on. Something is happening. Generally, people don't change unless something is forced. So a weather event, regulatory changes, large market changes, it sort of depends.

36:15
Ryan Kushner
Other things we've seen are we have an association with Governor's island in New York, which is a whole park, and they want, that's run by the park service, and they're saying, give us innovation. What can we demonstrate here? How can we play along? How can we have a clean grid on Governor island, which is right off Manhattan, and how can we help in the larger sphere of being a pilot site? And that's just great. So you have these places and opportunities which sort of emerge, which are fantastic.

36:46
Flo Lumsden
Is that something you prepare for as you're spinning up, working with a startup that has to deal with that issue? Like how do you help them connect to the.

36:58
Ryan Kushner
Absolutely. Well, I mean, it starts with, at least as a program, we say what needs to happen to decarbonize right? If we're saying as RMI their derivative, if we're targeting a decarbonized 1.5 degree c world, what needs to happen? Where are the emissions of what's going on? And for us, specifically within third derivative, where are the sectors that are under innovated, right. And so that's how we come up with our new cohorts are in, as part of our industrial innovation series, in steel, cement and petrochemicals. By what we've seen, they need to be decarbonized and there isn't enough innovation happening. And that's an ecosystem problem. So that's when we put together cohorts, which consists of innovators, startups, corporates, customers and capital partners.

37:55
Ryan Kushner
And so that becomes the ecosystem of the technology, the money to get to a scalable, reputable business, and then the end customer, or many end customers. So that's how we think about it. And this manifests in so many other interesting ways. Just to mention, we have program with Netflix and Disney and others who are in obviously the production space, and they're saying, bring us innovation so we can move away from loud, dirty diesel generators. What's out there, bring us innovation. And so that becomes a world unto itself, of innovation. So we have our general cohort, and then we have these theme cohorts that we work on.

38:42
Flo Lumsden
Electric fish is in the program with Netflix and Disney. Have they.

38:46
Ryan Kushner
Yes, exactly.

38:48
Flo Lumsden
Have they tried to plug into the grid on certain parking lots and things like that, or how has that gone?

38:55
Ryan Kushner
They do, I'm trying to think. They have a few deployments now. I think one is through a park service, one is with an OEM or manufacturer, people that have their own sort of innovation sandbox or aperture, where they're excited to use electric fish, which just dimension is effectively a modular sort of drop in EV charging system, charges from the grid shipping container, battery, ev charger. So it avoids a lot of permitting and other installation issues in addition to providing grid services and stacking functions, so on.

39:37
Greg Robinson
That's really cool. And so on the accelerator side, do you think that is one of the most critical parts of the accelerator? You mentioned the Y combinator methodology. There's a pretty well worn path of here's how you should scale up as quickly as you possibly can, so you can validate your market and demand and all that. Do the lean startup approach. But do you feel like that you, ecosystem of buyers, financiers, all that, is that kind of one of the kind of most critical components for your. When you think about building an accelerator? Yes, all the corporate partners.

40:14
Ryan Kushner
It is. It's the ability to be the convener and get the right people altogether that have genuine incentives to progress. And then also as a program, the technical acumen and the reputation to get great applicants, many high quality applicants, and then select the ones that aren't just like the right ones, but the ones that we can add value to at that moment to work with the partners that we have. And if there aren't partners, that we have to add those partners. That's a complex, moving dynamic that we deal in.

40:55
Greg Robinson
How many of the corporate partners that you work with are interested at all anymore in the marketing aspects versus, like you just said, I want to get rid of loud diesel generators.

41:09
Ryan Kushner
Yeah, that's an interesting question. Less and less sort of not quite greenwashing, but papering over of things. And generally, I mentioned this in the book. There are three categories of why do entities generally get involved in accelerators? They either want some CSR value, they have budget. This seems nice. The other is, it's an investment, generally from their corporate venture capital arm, or they really want the product and service to help their business. And more and more, it's that which is a function of there being just more solutions at a higher scale and everyone just getting so smart and the tools getting so good, and just the whole innovation sphere leveling up and really understanding customers and what they want and things like that. So it used to be more csre.

42:04
Greg Robinson
Yeah, that's why I noticed a decade ago, it was very focused on like credits and offsetting everything was these goals that people basically wanted to do one administrative task per year. Like, if I could just do that administrative task to offset my emissions, then I'm good, I get back to work. And now. Yeah, really starting to see this just get embedded into workflows.

42:31
Ryan Kushner
Yeah. When I think about the companies we work with and the size of the cohorts and the size, it was just, it was like a 10th or a hundredth of the scale that we deal with now. I've been in and created many accelerators and by far third derivative has grown faster and larger than any, which is we do a nice job, but also just that is the market. And so we ride the tide of genuine people, companies understanding innovation, wanting the end product, scaling and growing, and the clean everything can be an explosion.

43:10
Greg Robinson
Yeah, that's cool. Well, I have to ask my classic question that I ask everybody, which is, what happened to you as a kid?

43:19
Ryan Kushner
What did they do to you?

43:20
Greg Robinson
Yeah, what did they do? What happened to you? Yeah. And that could be anything, like what experience you had, anything that led you to this work that you do, whether it's entrepreneurship or helping entrepreneurs or climate specifically.

43:35
Ryan Kushner
Thanks for the question. I'd say there are a couple things that leap to mind growing up in Pittsburgh, and these are all in theme of, yes, we, as little tiny humans, can affect the big old world. And the two illustrative stories are grow up in Pittsburgh. I thought that old buildings just became black because that's what happens. There's like an oxidization that happens. All of the old buildings in Pittsburgh were black. And then one day I was going through Oakland, where a University of Pittsburgh is power washing and just making things clean. And someone explained to me like, oh, no, that's because they used to call Pittsburgh hell with the lid off and the light. Street lamps were on during the day.

44:20
Ryan Kushner
And people used to drive around just with their windshield wipers because there's just so much ash and particulate matter coming down all the time. It was just dark. And that darkness goes everywhere in people's lungs. All over your stuff and all over the buildings, all over Pittsburgh. Things don't get black unless you live in Pittsburgh, where there's that sort of just level of pollution. And so that was kind of like a wow. And it's still really fun for me when I'm home in Pittsburgh, the places where that haven't been cleaned. And you can see there's like this gradient on the front of the building where it's like black in the front and it kind of gets cleaner on the back just from that.

44:57
Ryan Kushner
And then I took a trip to Joshua Tree, and this was built as like, oh, we're going to go out to Joshua Tree. There's this big. This is like the grand canyon of Joshua Tree. There's this great vista. And we drove all out there and there was nothing there. It was just like brown everywhere. And this is the valley. Oh, you can't see it because all of the pollution from all the cars in La blows inland and settles in this valley. And it was very depressing because I was realizing that we can affect things, we do affect things. And I just knew that was not right internally. That just doesn't seem right and sort of, like, depressing when you know that you have to get involved and fix a problem. It was inspiring and difficult all at the same time.

46:00
Ryan Kushner
That's something that I want to work on if I'm going to have a career and have my 80,000 hours working on my career, which is the average length of a working career. What do you do? That sounds like a compelling problem.

46:14
Greg Robinson
Yeah, that is really interesting to have your connection to the pollution. I think a lot of times when people can just turn a blind eye, it's because it didn't impact them directly. We're so selfish as people. It's hard to look at the altruism.

46:34
Ryan Kushner
Or existential and we're good at normalizing to our benefit and detriment. We can normalize kind of anything, which is why in the timeline of when I've been in the climate tech industry broadly, there was this huge bump that happened at the beginning of COVID I'm not totally sure why, but I think we all remember those pictures of, this is Delhi now you can see things. This is Delhi normally, like there is no horizon. And I think it was so real in that same way to so many people. That was a huge kick in the pants. You remember that?

47:14
Flo Lumsden
Yeah, I had forgotten about that. I'm really glad you mentioned that because one of my best friends is from a very conservative republican family. I mean, I'm back in North Carolina now, so that's more common here. And I remember she told me the air was cleaner and the spring was like a normal spring and the fall was like a normal fall and the seasons were more evident and it was less hot and it was cooler. She was like, wow. Even her mom commented like, I can tell a difference from the fact that no one's been driving for six months. Maybe they are onto something.

47:55
Greg Robinson
Yeah, yeah, that is, yeah, that is really interesting. Like you said about normalizing you growing up in Pittsburgh, you very well could have gone the other way. Instead of being like, wow, that is caused by these things over here. You could just be like, oh, that's just life, that's just normal. That's what we do. If you want bridges, if you want bridges, you make steel and this is what that looks like. Yeah.

48:22
Ryan Kushner
I can imagine being at an earlier time when there was no other alternative. Or maybe the implications weren't as huge, maybe as global. Or be like, yeah, whatever, like, you gotta break some eggs. Yeah.

48:42
Greg Robinson
I appreciate you sharing all of this. I always also ask, is there anything that you would want people to know? You have this optimism about climate, which is, I think, very different than a lot of conversations that people are in. What could you say to people to help them share a little bit of that optimistic worldview?

49:06
Ryan Kushner
I think that people will only put up with bullshit for so long, especially when there are solutions. Some of the first things that a child says is, that's not fair, or they got more. We have an internal sense of justice, which is a huge driver for us. I think it is just inevitable because it is fundamentally stupid and unjust to burn the bridge that you're standing on. Even if renewable energy wasn't a technology and got cheaper, I think eventually we would figure it out. We would come up with a system, a carbon tax, whatever it is. We happen to live in this miraculous world where we kind of don't need to make sacrifices. We don't have to ask to pay for more money for clean energy. In the long run, it's inevitable in two ways.

49:55
Ryan Kushner
One is people like to exist and to exist in preferably nicer places without disruption. And it's inevitable just by the numbers learning curves on down. While there are these temporary disruptions, like a potential Trump autocracy, right? Like now we're all feeling a little more optimistic that would say that there's a self correcting system of we don't want that. And it's like a long arc of history kind of a thing, but keeps me sane.

50:31
Greg Robinson
Yeah, that's fantastic. I have no other questions.

50:38
Flo Lumsden
Thanks for jumping around with us and being nimble and on your feet.

50:45
Ryan Kushner
Oh, guys, this is like my favorite thing to do. The work is great, but just like geek out about it and think meta and to sort of couch things in a historical context. This is like my favorite stuff, guys. So it's like, how much am I paying you for this?

51:03
Flo Lumsden
Hey, it's Flo. We would love to hear from you. What questions do you have about the future of electricity and power? What guests do you want us to interview? You can let us know and help us get the word out by commenting, rating, and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram. Our handle for both is podcast.

51:29
Greg Robinson
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the World Changing podcast. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube to hear the latest episodes.