Bill Clerico
Founder & Managing Partner, Convective Capital. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutive@billclerico ↗LinkedIn ↗billclerico.com ↗
Bill Clerico co-founded and served as CEO of payment platform WePay, leading the company through its 2017 acquisition by JPMorgan Chase. He now leads Convective Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in physical resilience and wildfire mitigation technologies.
3shows
3appearances
39statements
14resolved
7supported
2contradicted
50%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Bill Clerico said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Clerico: Wildfires Surged Due to Forest Management and Grid, Not Climate
“The reason that wildfires really reached a crescendo in the last 10 years, in my opinion, is not because of climate change, it's because of things like forest management, it's because of the way we've constructed our electrical grid, sort of more acute, self-i…”
Clerico: Regulators, not utilities, block wildfire infrastructure investments
“And so there's sort of this, I think, ill-informed narrative that the utilities don't want to spend the money.
They actually love to spend the money and they would die to spend that money.
The issue is the regulators and the ratepayer advocates that basically …”
Clerico: Electric bills must rise to reflect California wildfire risk
“The cost of energy generation is sort of artificially low right now.
It does not reflect the risks of wildfire.
And so it probably means that electric bills need to go up, particularly in sort of high fire risk areas to fund a lot of this capex.”
Clerico: Prescribed burning creates asymmetric job risks for California fire chiefs
“If you're a local burn boss or fire chief and you want to do a prescribed fire, You know, it is the right thing to do, but it's kind of risky. If it escapes, if it burns someone's property, if you start the next, you know, Palisades fire, you know, you're gonn…”
Clerico: Palisades Water Failed From Plumbing Depressurization, Not Supply Shortage
“The water issues were related to there's three, one million gallon tanks as houses burned down, the plumbing opens. If you've got like a five eighth or half inch plumbing connection into a house, that's going to run at 20 or 30 gallons a minute. You have 500 o…”
Clerico: Regulated utilities profit by marking up CapEx 15% to ratepayers
“If, you know, PG&E spends five billion dollars undergrounding lines or upgrading transmission lines,
They get to mark that up by 15% and pass that through to ratepayers.
They love it.
That's how they make money.”
Clerico: P2P payments cannot work as a standalone business
“Really because there's no business model, it's about, you know, people expect that to be free and it's very hard to make money on that. So It makes a lot of sense as part of a bigger platform. And, you know, now most people don't know this, but Venmo is owned …”
Clerico: 98% of Climate Capital Goes to Mitigation, Only 2% to Resilience
“You know, I think if you look at climate capital that's deployed, 98% of it goes into what's called mitigation. So reducing CO two, two percent of it goes into resilience and adaptation.”
Clerico: Permitting conservation logging on 170-acre parcel took three years
“So I own a 170 acres of Timber. It's Douglas fir and redwood timber. Sarah's been there. And we did, I wanted to do treatment on that land. It hadn't been treated in a long time, and we wanted to log parts of it with a conservation strategy. It took three year…”
Clerico: U.S. Forest Service spends 40% of budget, $250M, on planning
“The US Forest Service, I saw a stat, they spend 40% of their budget, which is about two hundred fifty million dollars a year on planning, right?”
Clerico: Utilities Cause 11% of Ignitions but 50% of Wildfire Damage
“So utilities cause about 11% of ignitions, but those ignitions cause 50% of the damage.”
Clerico: Free-market insurance rules should drive homeowner wildfire hardening
“To me, the real answer, which I think is harder, but probably the real answer is actually to have the insurance companies create an actual free market for the insurance companies where they can say, I will only insure your house if you do these things, right, …”
Clerico: One bad investor on a cap table can ruin a startup
“One bad apple on your cap table can really spoil or even ruin the company.”
Clerico: A Startup Pivot Means You Failed as an Entrepreneur
“We in Silicon Valley use this term pivot as this catch-all Friendly term to just say, Hey, we're going to change our business strategy. But what it actually means is that you've failed as an entrepreneur. You know, you've, your strategy, your mission, your obj…”
Clerico: CFOs are the only role providing unbiased, cross-company evaluation
“And I think the other sort of unspoken benefit of CFOs is that they're really the only other function that can look across the entire company in an unbiased way and help sort of measure performance and help advise the CEO on how to invest the company's resourc…”
Bill Clerico: Big Banks Remain Unaffected by Fintech Disruption
“The reality is that the big banks have really been unaffected by fintech. You know, fintech has yet to really disrupt major parts of the market, and so I think it's still very, very early days, and it'll be exciting to watch what fintech does over the next 10 …”
Clerico: Forest Fuel Density Has Tripled Over the Last Century
“The first, and in my opinion, the most important one is just that fuel density or force density is, has increased Three times since you know, really in the last hundred years.”
Clerico: Paradise voted down stricter fire building codes during rebuilding
“When the city went to rebuild, there was an opportunity to pass, you know, more significant building codes at the local level, and that was voted down because it was seen as sort of too expensive and too restrictive for people to build. So Paradise largely got…”
Clerico: Cal Fire Budget Is Roughly Triple the US Forest Service's
“Cal Fire's budget is, I think, about triple what the US Forest Service budget is.”
Clerico: Undergrounding Power Lines Costs $3M to $4M per Mile
“You know, undergrounding can cost three to four million dollars a mile, and so that, you know, manifests in, in larger electrical rates.”
Clerico: California Reinsurance Costs Have Doubled or Tripled Over 5 to 10 Years
“The cost of reinsurance in California has at least doubled, maybe tripled over the last five or 10 years.”
Clerico: Firefighting drones will perform rapid wildfire attacks within a decade
“So in my opinion, I think over the next five to 10 years, we will see exactly what you're talking about drones to do rapid initial attack. So you see you know, you get an ignition that's detected from a camera or satellite. And drones are pre-positioned can ge…”
Clerico: Oregon sheriff arrested a US Forest Service worker over prescribed burn
“You know, there's very famous case up in Oregon where a local Republican sheriff arrested a U S forest service employee for doing a prescribed burn”
Clerico: Only weather changes, oceans, or massive retardant drops stop large wildfires
“Honestly, I think three things stop large wildfires. The weather changing, the ocean, or really large, massive aircraft dropping, you know, jets dropping huge amounts of retardant. You can't drop huge amounts of retardant in neighborhoods. It's too destructive…”
The other half of the tape: Bill Clerico's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 5 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4Ohad Samet 2Ooshma Garg 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 5
Top Founders 2
2019 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Mercury Founder Immad Akhund on Why Angel Investing Makes Founders Better Operators, The Right Way For Founders To Discuss and Present Competition To Investors & How To Think About Your Initial Wedge Into The Market and How It Expands Over Time
- 1515 TrueAccord Passes $10m in Revenue Helping Banks Recover $40m+ in Defaulted Payments Over last 12 months
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Being A Wartime Leader in a Time of Peace, Why Marketing Channel Diversification Is Like The Life of A Scientist and Why Small and Mighty Beats Loud and Weak with Ooshma Garg, Founder & CEO @ Gobble
- 20VC: The Fundamentals Of Optimising The Fundraising Process, SAFE's vs Priced Equity Rounds & Why Hiring Is Really A Big Data Problem with Chris Hutchins, Founder @ Grove & Former Partner @ Google Ventures
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Bill's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Convective Capital | 1 | 22 | 45% 5/11 | full record on No Priors → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Convective Capital | 1 | 10 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Convective Capital | 1 | 7 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Top Founders → |