The Wisdom Wall
9 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“In order to do first of its kind, to be an investor that's an anchor or a catalytic investor, you have to be long-term greedy. And I think that's understanding that the first of its kind project you're doing is not the only project you're doing. You're doing the first of its kind, so you can then do the second,…”
“So they're trying to scale 30 X, a hundred X. That is very hard to be seen as bankable in the project finance and infrastructure markets.”
“for many of these mainstream project financiers and infrastructure investors, they may not look at this stuff until it's project three. But then at Project Three, they can lean in, and these firms can write five hundred million dollar, billion dollar commitments to go build your fourth, fifth, and sixth plant.”
“I, I thought one of the smartest things I've heard about the difference between venture capital and private equity and infrastructure is that I think if you're a great venture capital firm, You know, you're providing 20 plus percent returns for 10 years. If you're a great infrastructure firm, you're providing 15% or…”
“And I think, for me, one of the key things to understand about folk financing Is that you need to embrace government as a strategic partner and be able to look for new non-dilutive capital sources, including a lot of this catalytic capital there, like, you know, breakthroughs catalyst program.”
“I think the first thing you need to start thinking about your FOC project at the Series A. These projects take years to get ready and then take years to build and finance. So you want to start this early. This needs to be part of your business plan. It needs to be part of your board, regular board discussions.”
“I think the second thing is that you need to actually get project finance and project development DNA into your firm. Like, I think that old analogy that people talk about, you know, venture capital, it's like, what are the top three things you pick in a, in a, for a venture capital startup? It's team, team, team. This…”
“one of the things that I'd like to add is an important part of the checklist for being Making your projects folk bankable is that a lot of these CFOs and CEOs of these new climate tech startups have to learn the language of infrastructure and product, project finance. And specifically, they have to be able to code…”
“Many markets that need to be carbonized Don't work on long-term contracts. They're spot. They're merchant, right?”