ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø

Note: This transcript was automatically generated and contains errors.

Rohan: Danny Kennedy, welcome to the podcast.

Danny: Thank you. Great to be here.

Rohan: Well, Danny, let's start with a broader reflection on your career as an agent of social change. Now, one of the social change frameworks that I've been very inspired by over the past couple of years is one by Julie Battilana and Marissa Kimsey, who say that successful social movements feature three distinct kinds of roles: the agitator, the innovator and the orchestrator.

Now you've played all three roles, either together or separately at different points in your career in the climate change space. You've been an activist at Greenpeace, including spending three days in jail in Texas for urging oil companies to stop oil exploration. You've been the co-founder of Sungevity . And now you play sort of an investor-convener role at New Energy Nexus. As you think about your own trajectory, how have these three roles enabled each other, and how have you adapted your approach over the years?

Danny: I think the construct is really right on. I believe a lot that there are different roles in different stages of social movements that need to be emphasized and I think I have played those three. This resonates very closely with a model of social change I like by Bill Moyer from the 20th century , called the Movement Action Plan, that actually had four roles : citizen, change agent, rebel, and reformer. I think the rebel, reformer and change agent relate very closely to your agitator, innovator and orchestrator. So the missing one there is citizen, which we all are all of the time. I mean, that's the role that we should always be conscious of as good citizens in a democracy, et cetera. And that's who we're trying to organize when we do the agitator, innovator, and orchestrator work.

And so I think it is very fair description and I have done that, I have intentionally changed from one role to another at different phases in the sort of social movement that I've always felt myself part of, which has been the climate and energy transition. I've been doing this work weirdly since I was a teenager in the 1980s, I'm old Rohan!

But we knew we had to prove there was a problem first. And so, the rebel or the agitator did that for the late 20th century, right? Decrying the dying of the light with fossil fuels and raising awareness with direct action and doing all the things you do in non-violent, civil disobedience, social movements. But at some point, we sort of turned a corner and the majority of the world was actually aware, notwithstanding the US Senate, that we had a problem. And what we needed was solutions. And that's where the innovator came in. Entrepreneurs is another word for that. And that's what I did, not just at Sungevity, but with a number of companies. Sort of helped set up half a dozen or so solar businesses, because I had a thesis that solar would become this dominant force in the energy transition, which it is.

And then the orchestrator that I've taken on, the orchestra I'm trying to orchestrate I guess, is more of that - more entrepreneurs, more ways to support startups to start up and succeed. Which is what New Energy Nexus does. So I think it's right.

How do they interact as roles? You know, I think the skillsets are actually weirdly transferrable. People don't get this when I say it, but my years and decades at Greenpeace and other nonprofits actually set me up really well for being an entrepreneur. I mean, the Greenpeace campaigner doesn't take no for an answer. They just persist and do whatever they have to do to stop the stupid Oil Shale project and the Great Barrier Reef. And seven years later they'll stop it. It's sort of similar to the entrepreneur that has an insight, some technology or product or service they want to take to market. And everyone says, oh, that's never going to happen. Oh, the incumbent's going to win. Oh, your landline telephones are just too dominant, cell phones never going to make it . Until they do overnight. They're a success 10 years later, sort of story. Very similar, belligerent, bloody minded attitude you bring to the task as both an entrepreneur and a campaigner, activist, organizer.

Rohan: So let me ask you this. You mentioned the US Senate, and US policymaking more broadly, not being very cognizant of the climate change crisis. Or if they were cognizant, not responding to it as adequately as they should have. We are now at a point when we've begun to see some changes in the policy paradigm. How do you think these three sets of players - agitators, innovators and orchestrators - need to recalibrate with their roles now as they work on getting these coalitions and clusters on the ground to start working to implement the policy changes?

Danny: Yeah, they have to adjust their form and function basically as social movement succeeds. More in the sense of an evolutionary succession or an ecosystem succession than it's done in one, per se, as a success. Then you need different roles to do different things to what they may have done before.

So to your question about the US Senate. I didn't ever believe the US Senate didn't understand the basic science of climate change. They were just bought and sold, as many politicians are, by the vested interest of the day, which were - in the late 20th century, early 21st century - the incumbent oil, gas, and other fossil fuel interests.

And so they denied the science. They obfuscated around Kyoto. They didn't do the deal. They blocked Markie and others to make progressive legislation happen. And we know that. That's all old history. What do the agitators and campaigners have to do? They have to continue to hold their feet to the fire because those vested interests still exist, and they're still powerful, and they still buy and sell politicians in this country in particular where campaign finance and the like is really contaminating our democracy.

So, you still need people to expose hypocrisy and double standards. And now that they're sort of like - oh I understand the science and I'm going to do things on global warming, but all the things I'm going to do are sort of half baked, false solutions- we need to call that out and be clear about that as citizens and as change agents, which is what the campaigners and rebels really do well often.

So there's still a role, but it's more about not allowing the success to slip back to the old ways and habits, and to keep progress moving forward. Meanwhile, because we're now in a situation where the majority of the world not only knows there's the problem of climate change, but knows there are solutions and they're better, cheaper, faster. Clean energy is simply good for customers and the economy, et cetera. EVs are better than ice cars. All these things. We need that role, , what I call the 'entrepreneur’, but you've called the 'innovator' to expand its spread of action and its function, to grow into a more dominant role and sort of eclipse the rebel agitator function in the social movement. Because we really need more solutions than anything. And that will move the movement forward faster at this stage of where we're at, given what majority public opinion is now looking for.

And you sort of see that in the electoral outcomes in the US in the last few years. The Republicans still bought and sold by fossil fuel interests, but were unable to resist the IRA, I mean did not even raise the Inflation Reduction Act as the Biden sort of mainstay legislation this year, because they knew it was a winner. They knew it was an electoral cat net for them to go after that, even though their masters wanted them to. They can't raise it as a problem anymore because the transition to clean energy is now baked and they've got to find other ways to fight , and culture wars, to divide and conquer, and do all the things.

Rohan: You talked about innovations now needing to spread and amplify their efforts. One of the flagship programs of the New Energy Nexus that you're the CEO of, is the Cal Seed program in California whose main goal is to help innovations overcome the value of death. Help us understand this value of death. What are the challenges clean energy startups have typically faced in this process of commercialization?

Danny: Sure. Just to say something about New Energy Nexus first. We run programs which are sometimes called accelerators, incubators, and funds. Different ways to support startup teams, founders, the entrepreneurs that drive companies, from "zero to hero" is what I like to say.

And we have programs designed to go from "Eureka" to "Exit". From, oh my God, I've got a better widget for that thing in the world in my head. But I need to actually take it from my head onto a laptop and then from a laptop into a market, and then test it with consumers and get it right, and then really roll it out, and then scale the manufacturing of it.

Think Tesla, which is actually a company many of us know the "lore" of, not necessarily correctly. Our organization, prior to my time so I'm not claiming credit for this, but just using it as an example- we invested in that company in 2005, very early about the same time Elon Musk did. You know, it wasn't actually him that started it, it was a couple of technical founders that wired together lithium-ion batteries from Walkmans to power a little go-kart kind of car. And that was the eureka. And obviously they've gone all the way through IPO and all the rest.

And the valleys of death. There are more than one along that journey for an entrepreneur. You have these phases where you need the big lift is to get it from will wiring the batteries together, make the road worth traveling or the car go down the street , and it does. Then you have a situation where you want to productize that and take that experiment to some scale of manufacturing production. And no one wants to invest in that because they don't know that there's going to be a market for it. It hasn't been tested. They don't know what the risks are, et cetera, et cetera.

So these moments in time when you have to eat while working, which is what entrepreneurs do all the time 24x7, are these sort of risk areas to pass through. So we design programs often to hold up companies through those passages. With non-dilutive grant capital, for example. So CalSeed, the program you asked about in California, which has backed over a hundred companies since 2016 in California to deliver on energy goals of the state of California, we provide $150,000, which is sort of maybe only ramen budgets for a team of two or three living in California, but maybe enough to do the next things.

And a bunch of training and support, including going through the Clean Tech Open, which is sort of an accelerator curriculum to help teams of founders learn what they don't know around running a business. And so we do all these things to lift them so that they don't crash into that Valley of Death, as it were.