Before the Tipping Point AI & Sustainability
Jun 5, 2026 · 18 min · 6 segments
Climate tech is hard to scale for real reasons: long sales cycles, infrastructure constraints, policy risk, and messy data. In this episode of *Before the Tipping Point: W*here AI and Sustainability…
Sam KolarGuestLoisHostNo entities detected.
So my first question to you, so it's such a great term, the industry that you're in, climate tech, and it has a reputation for being hard to scale, you know.
Like agriculture, aqua tech, I'm in that same boat originally wherein there's long sale cycles, infrastructure constraints, policy risk, and messy data.
So maybe you can share with our audience, when you drop into a venture with a complex problem, what is the first thing you diagnose to find a real scaling bottleneck, and what does the first 30 days of fixing it look like?
This is a, this is a great question and one that's really important when we start all of our engagements with our ventures because it's, it's how you start, which is how you can end in a great way.
I've now worked with a couple hundred founders over the last two years, so I'm starting to see, uh, some rhythm and some, some rhymes and, and you know what? It's almost never what they tell you the problem is in the first call.
And so the first 30 days for me is, is really less about fixing and more about getting up to speed with that situation, the business, the problem that they're actually solving.
Who's their team? What market are they working on? What's their product look like? What's the regulatory lane that they're operating in? I like to sit in on their meeting, read their materials, get a, a deeper understanding of their customers and their pipeline, maybe even talk to customers.
That allows me and our team to get a real read on where they're, where they're actually slacking and what we think good looks like versus where their perception of where they think their problems and b- so- opportunities are.
[chuckles] And, you know, then they'll say sales, but usually it's because their ideal client profile is way too broad, and they're trying to target five different segments at once.
So once you know where the real break is, we can actually go and, and, and fix it.
But, you know, we wanna make sure we're going through this diagnostic phase, this readiness phase, um, to, to make sure that we are, are spending the next phases in the most hyper solving problem sort of space, if that makes sense.
That makes total sense, and it's interesting when you were talking about diagnostic.
It was like, it really makes sense to me.
Like, you go to a clinic probably thinking, "Oh, I have a headache," and then they will tell you like, "Maybe you're dehydrated.
It's not actually the headache that's the problem, but you didn't drink enough water." So you know what they say.
Like prevention is an ounce of cure.
So like that's kind of what pop up in my mind when you said that.
[laughs]
So my first question to you, so it's such a great term, the industry that you're in, climate tech, and it has a reputation for being hard to scale, you know.
Like agriculture, aqua tech, I'm in that same boat originally wherein there's long sale cycles, infrastructure constraints, policy risk, and messy data.
So maybe you can share with our audience, when you drop into a venture with a complex problem, what is the first thing you diagnose to find a real scaling bottleneck, and what does the first 30 days of fixing it look like?
This is a, this is a great question and one that's really important when we start all of our engagements with our ventures because it's, it's how you start, which is how you can end in a great way.
I've now worked with a couple hundred founders over the last two years, so I'm starting to see, uh, some rhythm and some, some rhymes and, and you know what? It's almost never what they tell you the problem is in the first call.
And so the first 30 days for me is, is really less about fixing and more about getting up to speed with that situation, the business, the problem that they're actually solving.
Who's their team? What market are they working on? What's their product look like? What's the regulatory lane that they're operating in? I like to sit in on their meeting, read their materials, get a, a deeper understanding of their customers and their pipeline, maybe even talk to customers.
That allows me and our team to get a real read on where they're, where they're actually slacking and what we think good looks like versus where their perception of where they think their problems and b- so- opportunities are.
[chuckles] And, you know, then they'll say sales, but usually it's because their ideal client profile is way too broad, and they're trying to target five different segments at once.
So once you know where the real break is, we can actually go and, and, and fix it.
But, you know, we wanna make sure we're going through this diagnostic phase, this readiness phase, um, to, to make sure that we are, are spending the next phases in the most hyper solving problem sort of space, if that makes sense.
That makes total sense, and it's interesting when you were talking about diagnostic.
It was like, it really makes sense to me.
Like, you go to a clinic probably thinking, "Oh, I have a headache," and then they will tell you like, "Maybe you're dehydrated.
It's not actually the headache that's the problem, but you didn't drink enough water." So you know what they say.
Like prevention is an ounce of cure.
So like that's kind of what pop up in my mind when you said that.
[laughs]
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.