🎙️ How to hunt a gigacorn

Hey there,

Most people look at climate investing through the wrong lens - they see it as philanthropy or maybe a side-bet.

Nelson Switzer has spent his career proving the opposite. He’s worked inside global giants like Nestle solving sustainability challenges, and now as the co-founder of Climate Innovation Capital, he’s deploying capital into ventures that can both generate outsized value and deliver deep carbon reductions.

And he literally wrote the book on how to do it - The Gigacorn Hunter: Seven Principles for a Climate Investor.

In our latest podcast episode, Nelson unpacks the tactical frameworks and metrics he uses to find climate winners; why he’s unfazed by a market correction (and actually sees more opportunity); and how institutional capital and corporates can step up and deliver major climate impact.

Here are some of my top moments:

• (5:11) The fifth industrial revolution. Nelson explains why the decarbonization of everything is not just a trend but an economic and existential shift.

• (9:34) “Dollars in motion transform entire sectors.” Why Nelson believes capital allocation - not philanthropy or reports - has the greatest power to drive decarbonization.

• (13:31) The carbon qualification model. A tactical framework using scale, speed, and cost to evaluate whether a climate solution can bend the carbon curve.

• (21:42) Building trust with investors. Advice for founders on how they can build trust with potential investors - even if they don’t have totally complete data.

• (31:13) Opportunities in today’s market correction. Why Nelson sees discounted valuations, dry powder, and surging demand as the setup for the next successful vintage of climate funds.

• (37:40) Canada’s commercialization gap. Why Canadian corporates need to stop piloting and start buying if we want to build global-scale climate companies.

Takeaway: The long-term forces underlying climate investment - electrification, economics, and global policy - are here to stay. The U.S. and others may pull back for ideological reasons or investors might get spooked by some high profile failures. That creates an opportunity for Canada to become a leader in climate tech and the long-term clean economy.

Listen now: Spotify | Apple Podcasts 

Mentioned in this episode: 

• The Gigacorn Hunter - Indigo | Amazon

• Climate Innovation Capital

• Nelson’s site - nelsonswitzer.com

• Connect with Nelson on LinkedIn

• The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken (a personal fave as well!)

A quick note: We’re back with new episodes of The Climate Cycle after a short summer break! The podcast is all about diving deeper into the topics we cover in this newsletter: building a clean economy and accelerating Canadian climate tech.

We’ve got some great conversations lined up this fall with experts, founders and investors on the state of climate tech, food security, critical minerals and more.

Got a topic you want to see us cover? Hit reply, or drop a note in the comments below 👇️ 

Justin

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