This August and September, I’m stepping away from the mic to volunteer — but I’m not leaving your podcast feed empty. Instead, I’m revisiting fan favourites in a short Summer Classics series.

First up is Shannon Falconer, Founder & CEO of BioCraft Pet Nutrition (formerly Because, Animals). Two years on, they’ve made huge strides toward radically reshaping the pet food industry — and Shannon remains one of the most mission-driven founders I know. If you want good news about the future of pet food, start here.

👨‍💻 Hiring developers? You need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Set up a no-stress needs assessment at wild.codes/climate. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

🧑‍💼 Growing your team across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

I'm going to be spending the summer on the road, delivering humanitarian aid across Ukraine. And needless to say, it's not the best setup for recording a podcast. So things will be quiet here until about October when I'll be back with new episodes, when I'm back settled in Kyiv and in relative peace. If you want to follow my adventures, be sure to follow me on LinkedIn.

Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you'll be notified when new episodes come out. Have a great summer. Thanks for listening.

If you're hiring developers, you need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Today I work with Wild Codes. Go to https://wild.codes/climate for a no-stress assessment of your needs. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Felix Krause is the Managing Partner at Vireo Ventures, a European VC fund betting that the future of energy is electric, distributed, and intelligently managed. Based in Berlin, Felix brings sector-specific clarity to the sprawling world of climate investing and makes a strong case for why electrons, not moonshots, will define the next great energy transition.

In this episode we talked about:

🔋 Why electrification isn’t just inevitable—it’s the most capital-efficient climate solution on offer
🔄 What "sector coupling" means, and how heat pumps, EVs, and industry can all talk to each other
🧠 Why AI is the new electrification, and how it makes an increasingly complex energy system legible
⚡ The distributed grid, smart meters, and how regulation is slowing everything down
🔐 Why cybersecurity for backyard solar systems might be our next national security crisis
🔌 The dark horses of climatetech: agrivoltaics and bi-directional EV charging

#climatetech #electrification #energytransition #VC

If you're hiring developers, you need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Today I work with Wild Codes. Go to https://wild.codes/climate for a no-stress assessment of your needs. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Ismaël Bawah is the SciTech Community Coordinator at the Good Food Institute Europe and the man behind the Alt Protein Project, a global student-powered initiative to transform universities into hubs for alternative protein innovation. Alongside him, we also heard from Lisa Neidhardt of Imperial College London and Jorge Guadalupe of Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais—two campus leaders putting alt proteins on the academic map.

In this episode we talked about:

🌱 How the Alt Protein Project scaled to 63 active university chapters and sparked more than 20 new courses and 40+ research projects
🧬 Why fermentation is Lisa’s lab obsession—and how she’s using microbes to upcycle agricultural byproducts into food
🐔 Jorge’s role in creating Latin America’s first fried cultivated chicken (yes, really) and a new university course that ends with Shark Tank-style startup pitches
🧪 How mentorship, money, and microbes are building the alt protein talent pipeline from scratch
🎓 What it takes to get 13-year-olds (and their grandmas) excited about cultivated meat
📈 Why Brazil’s meat giants are pouring money into cultivated alternatives—and how geopolitics might do more for climate action than vibes ever will

#climatetech #alternativeproteins #futureoffood

If you're hiring developers, you need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Today I work with Wild Codes. Go to https://wild.codes/climate for a no-stress assessment of your needs. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Veronique Hördemann is Managing Partner and CFO at Future Energy Ventures, a climatetech VC firm investing in the software layer of the energy transition. From her base in Essen (with a side of Berlin), Veronique talked about going from corporate VC to a fully independent impact fund and why they’ve made a deliberate choice to stay clear of hardware.

In this episode we talked about:
🏙️ How they segment their investments across “future energy”, “future cities”, and “future technology”
📉 The real reason they avoid hardware investments (spoiler: it involves capital, time, and regret)
👩‍💼 The diversity problem in VC and why she wants more female-led startups in her pipeline
🔁 What it’s like going from corporate-backed VC to managing a regulated, independent impact fund
🏫 Why she thinks the school system is stifling innovation—and how that’s become personal

#climatetech #impactinvesting #venturecapital #VC

If you're hiring developers, you need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Today I work with Wild Codes. Go to https://wild.codes/climate for a no-stress assessment of your needs. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Anastasia Pavlovic is the co-founder of Eion, a carbon removal company that accelerates Earth's natural rock weathering process to lock away CO₂—permanently. Eion works with farmers to deploy enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in agricultural fields, creating a carbon sink disguised as soil amendment, with benefits to landowners and climate alike. Anastasia joined the podcast from Detroit to talk about carbon, kids, and the importance of remembering to eat.

In this episode we talked about:

🪨 How volcanic rock dust turns farms into carbon capture sites (and why the best rocks might be in Norway)
🌽 How Eion aligns climate goals with farm economics
🚢 The surprising math that makes ocean shipping rock across the Atlantic more carbon-efficient than it sounds
💰 Why climate tech founders need to think like infrastructure financiers and not just software bros
📉 How Anastasia regulates the highs and lows of startup life—with a side of mac & cheese

#Climatetech #CarbonRemoval #Agtech

If you're hiring developers, you need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Today I work with Wild Codes. Go to https://wild.codes/climate for a no-stress assessment of your needs. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Nemailla Bonturi is the co-founder of ÄIO, an Estonian startup fermenting fats and oils from yeast instead of palm oil or animal products. A Brazilian scientist-turned-founder, Nemailla now works at the intersection of synthetic biology, circular economy, and baked goods—with an in-house chef, of course.

In this episode we talked about:

🧫 How a “very special yeast” turns sawdust and stale bread into palm oil alternatives
🌍 Why Estonia is a unicorn factory
🥐 A plant-based butter that could make your croissant carbon neutral
🧴 Turning leftover dairy and tea leaves into moisturizers and lip balms
🧠 Mental health, therapy, and the importance of shutting your laptop at 6pm
📺 Why The X-Files may be the most pro-climate tech show of the 1990s

#fermentationtech #climatetech #circularbioeconomy

If you're hiring developers, you need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Today I work with Wild Codes. Go to https://wild.codes/climate for a no-stress assessment of your needs. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Eugene Beh is the founder of Quino Energy, where he’s commercializing organic flow batteries that are safer, cheaper, and more scalable than their vanadium and lithium-ion cousins. With a background in physics and chemistry from Harvard and Stanford, Eugene has traded academic labs for chemical plants—and he’s betting that petroleum byproducts might just be the unlikely hero of long-duration energy storage.

In this episode we talked about:

🔋 Why Quino's aqueous organic flow batteries don’t catch fire, unlike lithium-ion
💰 How Eugene expects his electrolytes to undercut vanadium on cost—possibly this year
🏗️ Why reusing tank infrastructure could slash battery installation costs
🌍 What makes Quino’s batteries geopolitically boring, and why that’s a good thing
🏥 Why hospitals, factories, and AI-fueled data centers might be early adopters
🛢️ And how coal tar and clothing dye might save us from an electrified future dominated by flammable batteries

#climatetech #energystorage #batterytech

If you're hiring developers, you need to look at Ukraine, where I've been hiring exclusively since 2018. Today I work with Wild Codes. Go to https://wild.codes/climate for a no-stress assessment of your needs. Podcast listeners get $1k off their first hire.

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate