Katherine Keddie: Hello, and welcome back to the latest episode of Scaling Green-Tech. Today, we have a very exciting guest for you. It's Juliette, the founder of Climate Connection. Climate Connection is an events platform and a community, and they bring together the whole spectrum of people within the early stage climate tech community. And they host events, for example, Climate Tech Time, which is the biggest monthly meeting of climate tech professionals in the UK. Before starting Climate Connection 2021, Juliette became very experienced working with startups across the US, particularly those technical and deep tech startups, helping them with public speaking and communications. She's also a public advocate for founder health and well-being. So there's a lot of great stuff for us to get into today. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's amazing to have you on Scaling Green-Tech. So the first question that we always start with, just to get people back to basics, and you are a professional communicator, so I have no doubt that this is going to be very easy for people to understand. Please explain Climate Connection to a five-year-old.
Juliette Devillard: OK, well, if I was talking to a five-year-old, I would ask a five-year-old about their favourite classes in school. And presumably, unless that five-year-old's in the best school in the world, there's going to be at least one class that they're going to say is really, really boring. Well, I would tell that five-year-old that I'm the kind of person who comes into that class and teaches the teacher how to make it more interesting. So how can you be asking your students more questions and getting that five-year-old to talk to his five-year-old friend in order to think things through or have some fun and go play some games. That's effectively what we do for adults in the context of events. I would say most adults going to large-scale conferences are sitting there just as bored as a five-year-old who is in their least favourite school class. Mostly because we are currently running events where Sponsors pay 20K to be on stage and then get to talk about whatever they want, even if it may not be relevant to the audience. People are walking around in suits and feeling awkward about there being 3,000 people there and not knowing who to talk to. And there are so many things about just traditional conferences, events, or even just the classic kind of spring or Christmas drinks that are just massively underproduced and not thought through for the reality of human attention spans. So that's what we do. We come in and we help people who want to run events to run them in ways that are much more interesting, much more interactive, keeping speeches short, making people talk to their neighbours, deliberately helping them to connect with people across the room that they've never met before, so that people are enjoying themselves throughout the entire process, but also getting a heck of a lot more out of it, because ultimately, my take is, if you're at an event, it's usually to meet people. If you just wanted to learn, you probably could have YouTubed the same thing and stayed at home on your sofa.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah and having attended many of your events I'd say for me the most notable difference is that they're very welcoming so it's very easy to come as a first time person, it's very easy to make new connections, it's very easy to learn and it doesn't have that kind of suited closed door feeling that many conferences do. So I very much very much have experienced that. So what makes your events different?
Climate Connection's event design philosophy and audience-first approach
Juliette Devillard: I would say what makes our events different is first of all, we always design with the audience in mind. So it's not about what the sponsors want. It's not about what we at Climate Connection want. It's about who is going to be in the room and how can we make an event that's going to be really exciting for them. That's part one. Part two is the reality of human attention spans. And if you're going to put people at the heart of things, let's recognize that people don't want to be spoken at. They want to be able to interact. They want to be able to create. They want to be able to talk to each other. And so how can we facilitate that? How can we keep speeches short and educational to the point? How can we be then inviting people to discuss the content of those speeches, getting them to mix with each other, meeting the right people over the course of the evening? And then part three is actually really a question of iteration and feedback and recognizing that if you want to be running something that's really good, you need to understand where its flaws are. So we do a lot of data collection as we run these events, both in the form of feedback surveys and in the terms of what we're actually observing as an event unfolds. And that's what enables us to really refine our craft is think about, okay, we noticed that wasn't quite as smooth as we wanted. Let's do that again. Ah, we're getting some feedback in these results saying, hey, this speaker or this way that this ran could have been a little bit different. And so we take that and we iterate on it and we tweak that so that the ROI of the event is just always increasing. So that's a big part of what we do.
Katherine Keddie: I think the iterative feedback is really clear. And I mean, even where we've run expert sessions in the past as a marketing partner, we've got feedback in the moment from people, but also we have people from our team sending us feedback that they got, giving us a score, telling what people enjoyed, for example, and it also allows us to do that too. So I think the growth mindset behind it is notable and I think different to how most people run this type of event.
Tell us more about what led you to starting Climate Connection. Was it that frustration with boring events or is that kind of something something larger that drove you to found the company.
The origin story of Climate Connection and early growth milestones
Juliette Devillard: I think definitely the recognition that a lot of events are not well tailored to human attention spans and what people actually want and need was a component of it. Another component of it was a recognition of what the ecosystem actually needed at the time. So when I started Climate Connection, It was post-COVID, there wasn't really anything going on in a major way within the climate tech world, and it was very disconnected. So having just moved back from the United States to the UK, that was one of the biggest differences that I noticed between the two countries, as it felt like we were so much more siloed in the UK, and also we were moving so much more slowly, comparatively speaking, to our colleagues in the US. And if we want to be scaling climate tech to the levels that we need to be able to fight climate change, then we need to be moving a lot faster. And that means more people meeting each other, finding the right partners, the right lawyers, the right investors, the right employees, et cetera, so that they can be scaling the companies and the technology that they're working on.
Katherine Keddie: I know you say Climate Tech Time, for example, which is a monthly event at The Conduit. People there have met co-founders, investors, like you say, employees, key partners. It's a real mixing pot of people. I think with the mutual goal of moving forward the technologies that we need to have a resilient future and one that's adapted to climate change. So, no, I think what you've done is very powerful in a space and especially a city, I think, which has quite a specific formula for events. But you mentioned your background working in the US. Where did you start at the beginning of your career and how did you end up here?
Juliette Devillard: Yeah, so I started my career actually before the United States working for the United Nations and very much in the world of diplomacy and how can we be helping people across cultures or different political views to communicate and work together on goals that matter. But I was very frustrated with the system in the sense of it being quite a large, slow, bureaucratic organization. And that was kind of what pushed me to leave the diplomatic context and look for somewhere that was equally impact-focused, but moving at the speed of the private sector. Luckily enough, I was doing a master's program at the time in Boston, and I stumbled across this amazing organization called Greentown Labs. Greentown is the US's largest climate tech incubator. At different points in time, they've had 100 plus companies all under one roof, working on incredible things like new approaches to geothermal or alternative shapes for wind turbine blades or ways of producing chemicals that are much more sustainable, etc. A lot of really interesting hard tech stuff. And it was finding that community that really helped me effectively find my home professionally, because it was so clear to me that these innovators are working on things that really matter, but also that a lot of what's going to help them get to where they need to be is going to be better networking and also better communication, being able to tell their stories in ways that can be understood by others who don't necessarily have a PhD, that are going to enable them to find the right partners and the right supporters as they continue their growth mission.
Katherine Keddie: What did you find in comparison to UK startups? Like what are the differences between the startups that you're working with there and the startups that you come across now?
US versus UK climate tech ecosystems and cultural differences
Juliette Devillard: I would say it's not so much about perhaps the startups but all the ingredients that go into helping those startups get to where they are. So I think there's a cultural component where entrepreneurship is more It's almost a cultural norm in the United States, right? There's a very strong culture over in the U.S. of let's start something up. It's a very kind of, hey, we believe in meritocracies, we believe that anyone coming from any background can achieve anything they want with enough hard work. That's kind of very embedded into the concept of what it means to be American or why people might move to the United States. And so that concept of let's start something, let's work on it, let's scale it, very very present. Whereas I think in the UK that's not to say that we don't have many entrepreneurial people but it's less common a piece of the culture. I think we have a lot more people who are perhaps more risk averse coming from backgrounds of all types and just being pushed through a school system that doesn't necessarily encourage that level of creativity and self starter energy as in the United States. So I think that's one component is that you might find a higher willingness to take risks and to experiment in the United States whereas I think in Europe as a whole and also in the UK there is a little bit more of a like I'm going to do this when I know I've got it right. which generally doesn't tend to be the right way to build a startup. You kind of need to just try loads of stuff and fall on your face. So that's one component. I think the other piece to acknowledge is that the United States just has a more developed startup ecosystem. So there's more resources, there's more programs, accelerators, incubators, there's a heck of a lot more government money, or at least there was back when I was there. Now that might be debatable. So that's an opportunity that the UK can jump into. But there's also a lot more funding on the investor side. Traditionally, rounds are significantly bigger. The milestones that you might need to prove in order to access a certain level of funding are going to be lower in the United States. You're more likely to get funded for just an idea in the US than you would be in the UK. And that, in a way, is the same type of cultural influence we have in the United States around this risk-taking piece because effectively in the same way as startups are less likely to take risks in Europe, the investors are also in a way much less likely to take risks and are looking for more proof points and more guarantees that those startups are actually going to get somewhere.
Katherine Keddie: Do you find in the UK market over, I mean it's been five years, four years since you started Climate Connection, do you find that the investor culture has changed at all in the UK?
Deep tech investment trends in the UK
Juliette Devillard: I think one thing that's been really promising is to see the number of people who are understanding that deep tech and defensible IP is actually a really big value add. There have definitely been currents in the past that have promoted the idea of software and B2B SaaS and whatever being the right way to go. And great, I'm sure there's many investors out there who make a heck of a lot of money off scaling those types of companies, but if we're trying to address the climate crisis, those are not going to be the companies that are going to get us there. Basically everything around us that you can physically see in this room has some amount of embodied carbon in it. We can't invent software products that are going to change how we make the physical infrastructure of this world. And so in that sense, we need to be scaling up deep tech solutions. And we need investors that are going to be willing to do that. And I think that is one thing that has emerged both in the US and in the UK. 10 years ago, there were not that many deep tech investors. It was really kind of seen as this is too hard, too risky. it's not going to give as many returns and it's going to take a longer time window to actually achieve those returns. Now, I think there's more and more people waking up to, hey, this stuff is worth doing, this stuff has huge potential, and as long as we can figure out how to scale it, we're going to be able to do this.
Katherine Keddie: So about a year ago we started a project where we went through all of the green tech funds like early stage investors in the UK and we put them on a map and we found that there were I think between 65 and 70 funds obviously ever expanding which is positive for our sector. And we then looked into those funds and tried to work out in which categories do they invest and what sectors and what's their investment thesis. And we actually found that over half, it was something like 65% of them were deep tech investors. They said explicitly on their website, we're looking for deep tech investment. We're really interested in that as a future concept and that number has only increased for the funds that we've been tracking. So definitely our experience as well, which like you say, is very positive when it comes to climate tech. That's great to hear. I would love to get a copy of that research at some point and get to sift through that. Well, it's on our website for anyone listening. So going back to your journey, in the US, you're kind of learning everything about the kind of green tech startup journey and the communication side and you come back to the UK and you're thinking about starting Climate Connection to fill some gaps, to create community, to create that kind of supportive startup infrastructure that we need. What has your journey been like since starting in 2021 to now?
Juliette Devillard: Really interesting. I mean, Climate Connection first started as very much a side project. I did not plan on this becoming a company. I did not plan on this becoming a full-time job. Originally, I just felt like, hey, there's a missing piece here. We need to run some events. We need to bring people together. And I think I can do that in a way that's going to be really interesting. And I ran an event, and people were like, please do this again. So I committed to doing it every month. And effectively, they just grew month on month. They were pretty much doubling in size in a fairly consistent way for the first few months that we ran things. So we're constantly outpacing our venues, having more and more demand for it, until the point where effectively a member of the ecosystem who'd attended some of these events came forward and said, hey, I'd like to fund this. Can I give you a fairly large sum of money to go off and make these events much more professional? And I think you've got something really good here and the ecosystem needs it. And so that moment was really key for us, and that company was Terra.do. And it was Terra.do as a result of coming forward and saying, hey, we want the ecosystem to grow. Terra.do, by the way, is a really cool startup that helps to retrain people so they can transfer into working in climate. And so they were a US-based startup, and they basically said, look, we want to back this, and we want to sponsor it, and we want to be helping to retrain the potential people in your audience that might be looking to get into climate tech as well. And it was thanks to their funding, effectively, that I thought, OK, well, if we've gotten this far, if there's this much demand and we're already having commercial interest without having ever looked for it, this might be a model that could work as a business. And from what I'm seeing, there's people who want this to happen. So on that basis, I decided to give it a go and go full time. And then from there, started claiming scaling Climate Connection. A really big milestone for us after that was starting to work with Innovate UK. That was a really big component of our growth in the sense that it was the first large contract that we unlocked that enabled us to effectively stabilize the organization and be able to really say, look, we are here. This is going to continue for year on year. with a regularity of events, both for investors and for startups and for the entire community. And so in that sense, that would, I would say, would probably be one of our next milestones. Obviously, there are some numbers-based milestones, like moving into a consistent 100 people per event, 180 people per event at one point was our norm. And then we changed venues and downsized and made it more professional. And we've actually kind of focused more on quality over quantity. So these days we do about 140, 150 per event for the main climate tech events. I'm at Tech Time, sorry. So yes, that's a little bit of the journey. I would say initially it was mostly about bringing the community together. Over time we've niched into various different places, so we do one big community event, we also do investor-specific events, we do founder-specific events, and for each of those you design the event around what it is that that particular audience actually needs. So, it's been a lot of fun, really, really cool to be developing. And most recently, we've also launched the Community Partner Program, which was, and you know this very well because you were part of this, but the Community Partner Program we brought into being because we felt that there was a gap within the ecosystem in terms of startups being able to access different levels of expertise in areas that would be really important for them to be able to scale their companies. And so, for that reason, we launched this Community Partner Program where we brought in an expert in each kind of vertical that or in each, let's call it, industry specialty that a startup might need in order to progress along their journey. So, so far we have partners like ourselves in marketing. We also have partners in IP law, in scaling and go-to-market sales, in recruitment. So, lots of different amazing people in PR as well. people from across the ecosystem who have those specialties and who can come in and advise an early stage startup on what it actually takes to get that particular part of their business right. And that's, I think, a really amazing resource that has been available to the community in the last year.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, it's definitely a value add. And I mean, a lot of the partners that you have on this program also, it would be so difficult to get free advice, like the standard of advice is really high. So I think it shows how you're constantly trying to find ways to better serve your community. And it's very apparent with the events that you have you have different sizes different focuses and sometimes you have industry specific. You have a bunch of different speakers from different countries like that there's range but each with a quite specific niche. and a clear value add for the people attending. It's very noticeable how purposeful your work is and the way that you bring together the community in different ways. I think for anyone listening, especially those who are building their own company or startup or thinking about doing it, having a community around your company is also really important. So obviously not everyone is going to start an events company. But everyone who's a founder should be thinking about the community that they're building. So for those listening what advice would you give to people when it comes to building a purposeful community around their work.
Founder well-being and building resilient support circles
Juliette Devillard: It's a really interesting one. I actually just ran an event last Friday at The Heat, which you might have come across. So the Climate Tech Festival happens up in Oxfordshire. And one of the exercises that I ran at The Heat, the sort of experience that I ran for the audience that was there was around thinking through the fact that it is a marathon and not a sprint. We need everyone who is working on climate tech today to still be here in 10 years to work on these exact same issues because it's going to take a while to solve them. And that being the case that means that we as individuals as leaders of our companies need to develop systems that are going to help us be resilient and a lot of that is going to be community. So the exercise that I ran on Friday that I'd recommend anyone listening to do is to start by writing down three people professionally and three people personally who you know would have your back no matter what. So people that you when something really tough is happening in life and the reality is both professionally and personally those things are going to happen on the professional level. Right. We've already seen recessions come and go. Changes in political alignment both within our government and abroad which are changing the way that the landscape interacts and the amount of funds available. There's going to be so many different obstacles at a macro level. And then there's also the reality of Each of us is likely to, over the course of our career, face things like bereavement, breakups or divorces, personal life tragedies or mental health issues, and all of that is stuff that we need to be prepared for. So who are the people who you can have on your side and who can already have the conversations with in advance saying look I'm on this journey. I know this is hard. I know scaling a company as a founder is hard or I know that working on climate is going to be something I need to be doing for the next 10 years. I want you to be there for me as part of this journey. So how do we build those support circles. So three people professionally three people personally. and thinking through, do those people know what they mean to us? Is this something where we could have a conversation with them to bring them closer to us, to have them as unofficial advisors to what it is that we're building, to have them as personal support for ourselves as leaders as we continue to grow? And that, I think, is one way to start thinking about community is, before you launch into the broader, OK, let me build some other thing, start with your own initial support group. From there, if you're looking at wider community, then come and join something like Climate Connection. And there are others out there as well, depending on the niche that you're looking at. But there are plenty of people who are creating the infrastructure for you to be able to find more people that you can be surrounded with and more resources that you can be helped by.
Katherine Keddie: I love that. I think that's such a tangible way to do it. I'm going to go home and do that. Because Adopt is about to be five years old and it's given me food for thought I guess. Like looking back and thinking about all the people that have been part of it. The immediate thought of community is you know our clients, our supporters, the people we've worked with. the partners that we've built like all of that which is kind of quite literally the community on which you know the company has been supported. But there's also all of the personal connections in my life that have been absolutely invaluable and have got me to this point. And without a doubt without them it wouldn't have happened. So I think that's a really good realistic way to look at the community around you and also focus on community as quality and as support and like mutual support over big events or like network connections or LinkedIn, which I think can sometimes be not, I mean it's definitely not as fulfilling.
Juliette Devillard: I mean there's also something here it's like you need different types of people for different types of challenges. And have you thought through the types of people that are in those support circles for you. Because the person who is going to hold you when you just feel overwhelmed and the friend who's going to chat through things is going to be quite different from the person who you can sit down with and debrief on why you lost a huge sale. And you need both of those because you need people who are going to give you the harsh truth on the business front and the people who are going to pat you on the back and go hey you've got this. That was hard, but I believe in you. Tomorrow's going to be better.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I think sometimes it's useful to have someone else also who's not involved in the day to day who can be like, let's take a step back for a second and realise that actually Life is good. There are things that you can take away from this, there's things you'll learn. You can move forward and actually having the big picture is so important. I think particularly it must be hard for you as a solo founder. I know you have a brilliant team that you've been building, but when it comes to your own well-being, how have you approached that, especially at the beginning when you were kind of building alone?
Juliette Devillard: The reality is I've had kind of an unofficial advisory board throughout my time building Climate Connection. There's a handful of really amazing friends who have just always had my back. I find it, I still to this day find it quite hard to make some of the decisions I have to make by myself. I think that's something really valuable to getting to sit down with someone and going, look, I think this is what I need to do, but I still need to be able to say this out loud and just hear that I'm not totally insane for thinking this. And so, you know, yeah, I've been lucky that I've had some very, very close friends who themselves have fantastic careers in things ranging from sales to therapy to entrepreneurship. And their different perspectives have really, really been helpful as I needed to make those decisions, particularly in the early days. It takes a village.
Katherine Keddie: It takes a village, yeah. Something that I, when I think about you and your work, that always comes to mind is how you've been an advocate for mental health for founders. And I think it's so common to see founder burnout, to see co-founders falling out. Those are, if anything, the most common ways that startups fail other than running out of money. And I think for those listening who are on that founding journey, what lessons do you have, I guess, from your own experience or from what you've seen that they can take forward to have a healthy and happy journey, not just one that sprints forward and then ends in a burnout.
Co-founder check-ins and preventing burnout
Juliette Devillard: Yeah. One thing that I've seen people use in personal relationships as well as professional relationships is just the concept of a standing check-in on a regular basis. That is not your usual business check-in. It's not, hey, you know, how many times, like, what sales have we done? Have we hit our objectives? Have we whatever. It's things like, How are you actually feeling right now? How much have you slept? What is your level of nervousness about these various projects? Is there something left unsaid between you and I as co-founders? Do we feel like if we were working at this pace, we would still be able to work at this pace three months from now? Those types of questions are the things that I think people could be building into check-ins with each other in a more consistent way that would help founders to realise very early on when there's tensions that are coming up or very early on when it is that they're doing things that are unsustainable. And that I think could be something that people use much, much more widely.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I think those honest conversations, like you actually just being real and not just focusing on the deliverables is so key. Actually me and Matt, my co-founder, we do sleep check in every week. And we decided quite early on that to run an effective business and to make good decisions you have to be well rested. It's foundational to like cognitive function, to development, to learning. And especially after the first year when we were kind of more established and we were able to confidently sleep at night, I think it became a regular practice. So I definitely agree with that, but there's some good questions in there that I'll definitely pick up on. I love that. Is there anything else that you guys do? We do, so we each track our habits and then we report back to each other as an accountability partner on our habits for the week. So for example, if I don't exercise, I'm immediately like 30% less happy. It's not like a cumulative thing for me, it's like immediately. And when I'm really busy, that tends to start to kind of go down and my energy goes down and my positivity goes down and my ability to be able to come up with new ideas goes down. So for me, I would put on my list of, or I have on my list of habits, just like a regular exercise. I mean, like walk, go for a swim, go to the gym, whatever. That for me is, I guess a trip wire, we call it, for how you're feeling. If I'm suddenly, if I suddenly stop exercising, it's like, okay, we've gone quite hard. How are we going to make sure that we balance that this week, because otherwise it so easily just becomes a habit. And I think when you love what you do and you're really passionate about it, you can just work on it nonstop. And that. that the result of that is is negative. So that one also like relationships check in like are we we do things like we seeing our friends and family have you spoken to other people like that kind of stuff and then basics like eating. normal healthy meals three times a day and sleep. It's all very basic stuff, but I think it's so easy to slip.
Juliette Devillard: But those are the building blocks, it really is. I have a chart that's on the inside of one of my cupboards in my house that is from a time pre now, luckily, where I was really not doing well mental health wise. And there's this checklist of stuff on there. which I basically say, look, if you can identify that I'm doing anywhere between zero and three of these, I'm probably okay. If I'm doing anywhere between three and five of these, you should probably check in on me. If I'm doing anywhere between, you know, five plus and 10 of these, things are not going well in my life right now. And these will be things like, how chaotic does my room look? Yeah. You know, am I eating properly? And all of these types of things of, am I sleeping? Am I whatever? Like, am I leaving dishes around the house? Like all of those are like outside external signs of like what's going on internally. And it's exactly what you're pointing towards. It's the reality that actually so many of these things that we don't think about that much. or we think about as, you know, incidental to what we're actually doing at work, really what determines how well we're doing mentally and how well we're able to perform.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah. Yeah. And I think having a realistic view of your health as being the foundation of success for your business, I think is really important. So having a good understanding of yourself is really foundational to being a good founder and running a business. So no, I totally agree. OK, so taking it back to more of the professional sphere, though, as we know, that is based on the personal stuff and the well-being, you have spent a lot of time helping people better communicate their ideas. And in particular, I know you do a lot of public speaking. For those listening, what are the top tips you give for people that say they are a technical founder or someone who hasn't done a lot of public speaking in the past? before they go on stage, what should they think about?
Juliette Devillard: Okay. Well, let me clarify. So I think there's very different components to this type of advice. So are you looking for just, okay, I've already got my content, how can I deliver it well, which is one whole category of things, or are you looking for how do I create my content or my message or whatever else it may be?
Katherine Keddie: Let's go for, I've created my pitch deck. Let's say I'm going into climate tech time and I'm about to present to an audience of people who are kind of more general and let's say my solution is quite technical. With everything kind of pre-prepared, have those nerves, I'm going on stage, what should I keep in mind?
Public speaking advice for technical founders
Juliette Devillard: One of the first things I tell people is it's very helpful to think of the audience as rooting for you. So nobody comes to an event going, oh my God, I really hope that speaker's crap. The reality is that they're going, oh my gosh. If they see you hesitating, they're like, oh, I hope they remember what they want to say. I feel bad for this person. I want them to be able to get their point across, et cetera. There's so much goodwill in the room. And I think that people forget that. And they often think that they're being judged or assessed or whatever else it may be. And so that's the first one, is to think, OK, everyone in this room wants to hear from me. Otherwise, they wouldn't be here. They've signed up knowing that I was speaking. They want to hear from me. They're on my side. That's one piece. The next thing that I would generally advise people to do is to figure out what it is that's going to help them be in the moment and access the part of them that they really believe in. So everybody has the capacity to be a very, very good public speaker. Everybody has the capacity to tell an amazing story. The question is, are you used to tapping into that part of you that is excited and inspirational and believes that you can do it? And there's lots of different ways that you can try and work on that. There's a few tips that I'll give that people have applied in the past can range from things like remembering the last time you did something really well. So maybe the feeling that you had when you stepped off stage after having nailed a pitch to an investor, like going back and going, I've already done it and just remembering that and then bringing that energy on stage. An alternative one is if you've got a pump up song that you always listen to when things are going great, You listen to that and then that brings you into that energy and then that's the energy that you're walking on stage with. So there's lots of different pieces there. Some people like to just ground and kind of do a body scan or get more in their body. Other people will look at a photo of their family or their best friend and realise that there's loads of people around them that love them and that believe in them. Whatever it is, there's something about connecting to that part of you that feels confident and excited and happy to be there and knows that they have something to offer.
Katherine Keddie: What's your trick before going on stage? Do you have a pump up song?
Juliette Devillard: Oh, I do have pump up songs, but I don't tend to use them for the events that I have because I'm very often around and running a lot of things right before I get on stage. So I have more of a little process of just like tuning in and kind of finding it internally. There's a word that I anchor in, which is welcome. which comes from internal family systems therapy, the idea of just welcoming whatever emotions it is that you're feeling and remembering that whatever your emotions, whatever your experience is, that's normal. So by going welcome, it just reminds me of, wow, now I have the capacity to be with whatever's here.
Katherine Keddie: I love that, it's like you can't really control what's going to happen, you just welcome the experience as a whole. It's so funny because at the start of the episode I said the thing that I took away most from your events is that it's welcoming. So you're clearly, you know, getting that out. It's definitely part of what we try and do, yeah, for sure. Yeah, nice. Okay, so new scenario. Again, you have stuff prepared. You're going into an investor meeting and let's say you're raising a seed or a pre-seed round quite early on, so you haven't done that much pitching to investors. Maybe this is your first time. Before people go in front of investors, is there anything that you wish that they knew?
Juliette Devillard: And there's lots of things one can answer to that question. But one that I would bring it back to is again these are humans. These investors are ultimately people who you either want to work with or don't want to work with. And choosing an investor that you have a good relationship with is way more important than choosing the investor that has the most amount of money because that person is going to be with you on that journey for the next five possibly 10 years. The amount of time that an investor is with you in some cases exceeds the amount of time that you're married to the person that you're with. And so understanding that, hey, building rapport with this person not only is going to be helpful for you potentially closing that deal, but also is essential for you to understand and assess whether you like the energy that this person is going to be bringing to your company. Because they're putting cash down, but they're also coming with a lot of expectations. They're coming with potentially advice. And if that person is aligned with you and you get along and you know you can have honest conversations and you can feel that there's that level of mutual trust, That's going to be such a different relationship compared to someone where you've taken the money because it was the best offer on the table but actually maybe they're not the right kind of person to have on that journey with you.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, that's true. It's a very long lasting relationship. And I think also a bit of advice I heard from a fan we work with is considering it kind of like a date where it's like a two way. So, you know, you're going on a first date and you're thinking, OK, I want to be the best version of myself for this date. You know, maybe you're a little bit nervous going in, but like fundamentally you're also assessing compatibility with the other person more so than anything. And it's not am I perfect for this person? It's also person perfect for me. So no I think that's a good way of putting it and also means that you don't just panic because it's intimidating and take bad deals which is also quite common. No I think that's great advice. So final scenario, say a founder comes to you, they have investor meetings coming up and they want to find a really short, snappy way to describe what they do. Their work is quite technical and the audience is medium technical but it definitely needs some kind of a simple summary so that people can access and understand what their work is and the value that they bring. Where should they start with trying to reduce down that story in an accessible way.
Communicating complex ideas to non-technical audiences
Juliette Devillard: Got it. So the question is really around how do you effectively communicate a very complex topic. OK. I would always say start with what your goal is. So regardless of how technical you are or how technical your audience is what are you trying to get out of this particular opportunity. Is this you here speaking to them because again you think there are investors in the room. Are you speaking to them because this is a room of experts and there may be potential recruits for your company. Are you speaking to them because you just want to spread the message about what it is that you're building? What is that end goal? And as a result of that end goal, what is the key message that you want to be putting across? Because there's going to be a pretty big difference between, again, if you're trying to speak to investors, talking about, hey, the future potential of this and how much this is going to be an innovation that's going to impact different markets, et cetera, versus, actually, I'm here to impress people with my academic knowledge. And so starting from that goal, or starting from the audience, the goal relative to the audience, and then backtracking to, OK, so therefore, the main point of my talk should be x. And then from there you start constructing your talk and you layer in OK if I need to make this big point how can I set that up with the best story. How can I kind of bring in the right amount of detail. Is this detail actually needed or not or is it superfluous and can I cut it. Those are some of the ways that I would think about constructing that type of thing. And ultimately the shorter you can do things the better. So once you've done draft one I would go through and I would think about OK if my goal is X is this sentence needed. If my goal is X, is this paragraph needed? Et cetera. And just kind of keep reducing down and down and down until you're really only keeping the stuff that directly supports the narrative that you're trying to create.
Katherine Keddie: Could you give us an example with Climate Connection? What's the kind of one liner that you would say, someone says, tell me about Climate Connection. What do you do? And let's say I'm someone who's interested in sponsoring an event. How would you frame it?
Juliette Devillard: Okay, so you're telling me that my audience is a potential sponsor. Then I would, again, lead it as a conversation more than I would as a pitch because it's the same thing back to that concept of an investor. A good sponsor or a good client is the same thing as a good investor or a bad sponsor or a bad client and a bad investor. And in that sense, so my first question to them would be, well, tell me about, you know, what your needs are right now. Why do you care about climate tech? Why do you care about supporting the ecosystem? Or what are your business goals? Are you trying to grow your brand? Are you trying to meet new people in the sector? Are you trying to recruit new talent? And once I understand what it is that they're actually trying to do within their own business, then I can start having a conversation with them about, OK, well, does sponsorship even make sense? Because, again, I don't want to bring you on board if you're not actually going to be getting what you want out of this, because that will just lead to an unhappy relationship in both directions. And the reality is there's 15 other ways we could probably be working together that might not be that particular first avenue. So asking the questions first and then from there going OK well here are the ways that we might be able to get to what you want.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah I think it's a really useful framing. We kind of call it like qualifying the intention. So for example if we have a conversation with anyone about our work very very rarely would I lead with a pitch about what we do. Much more curious about like what their goals are and what they're trying to achieve and what they're doing. And then I think it allows you to also communicate about the things that matter to them rather than, which I think is very common with investors, just kind of saying the same cookie cutter thing that you say every single time. And then let's say 10% of it is of interest to the person, but it's taken you until the end to get there. And you've already probably lost the interest of the person. So no, I think that kind of initial qualification is also important. because you don't have to just go in and go, this is my elevator pitch, you know? So no, I think that's very helpful for people. And you can hear throughout this interview, you know, when I ask you a question, you're like, do you mean this or this? Like you're still kind of helping to understand what exactly I'm looking for. So it's very meta, but I can also see that happening in our conversation now. So let's take it back to our broader work. So we both work in climate tech, and there's a very clear elephant in the room of climate tech at the moment, which you sort of alluded to before. Policy is changing at drastic rates, both for governments across the world and for large corporates and the kind of policy alignment that it felt like we had in many areas five years ago even, feels like it's now starting to dissipate. For climate tech companies and founders, how do you think that they can deal with that? What do you see as success stories from the community that you've built or how are successful founders navigating the headwinds that come with all of these changes?
Navigating political headwinds and reframing climate tech
Juliette Devillard: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely, we're in a difficult period where people are questioning whether the word climate tech is the right word. And the reality is that politically it is becoming a less attractive word to be associated with. At the same time, I think we have to tread a delicate balance here. Ultimately, climate tech was called climate tech because we are trying to solve the climate crisis. That problem is not going to go away. We're going to need all the same technologies that we needed regardless of what the political environment is. How do we make sure that the technologies that are actually climate tech, still get the funding that they deserve, even in an environment in which that funding is less keen to be associated with those words. And I think this comes down to, to some degree, some creative branding, which you're obviously an expert in yourself. But how do we have a message that appeals to people from across different backgrounds, regardless of their ideological camp? And so keeping the word climate tech I think is important at a higher level. But when you're pitching certain investors or certain clients how can you frame it once again in terms of that person's needs. If we're talking about something that for example is an innovation that could help to decarbonize homes by maybe increasing insulation. and reducing heat loss, well then yes, you could say this is a climate tech technology because we're ultimately trying to reduce carbon emissions from heating, but at the same time you could also say, hey, this is something that we're developing because we want to help people with the cost of living crisis. This is also something that we're developing because we want to be gaining efficiency within different large businesses, hence cutting back on bills. there's lots of ways of using the exact same technology to solve different goals that may be more politically palatable in a certain environment.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah and I think also easier for people to relate to and understand. So I think you know let's say you're making it much easier for homeowners to insulate their home and it's going to mean that they pay less on their energy bill in the winter. and it means that their home is warmer and cleaner and you know they don't get drafts or whatever. Those things I think are much more personal and tangible. So it's not that you can't have both aspects in the messaging but rather that there might be different ways that you frame the same thing that showcase value for the person at hand. So I guess it goes back to like qualifying who you're speaking to. If someone has a really high energy bill during the winter and they're also really cold That's a very pressing and personal need and I think it makes it, if anything, aside from everything that's happening with policy, there comes a moment where I think it's better to frame solutions in the way that works for the audience they're trying to reach rather than through language that maybe they would have used at the beginning of their journey. Yeah, absolutely. How are people in the community feeling about these policy changes? It obviously makes things more difficult and involves some changing in framing, like we say, but also it reduces funding. It maybe scares investors. There are real tangible impacts of this that go beyond the framing of the work. How do you find people are responding generally in the community that you have and more widely in the climate tech community in the UK?
Juliette Devillard: I mean, I think it's undeniable that there is a little bit of a sense of decreased optimism than there was a few years ago. And at the same time, I kind of want to not reinforce that message. I think that the more we talk about, oh, you know, things are going worse, the policy's worse, the economics of this are not working out or whatever else it may be, the more we're kind of contributing to a downward spiral that may involve other people thinking, you know what, maybe I shouldn't work in the sector, maybe I should pivot or move away from having this particular company focus on climate tech into something else that's more profitable. And I would just say, look, I mean, these waves are going to go up and down. We're going to have a resurgence in the same way as we're having a wind down right now. And again, the issues that we're working on are not going to go away. So if you're in this because you believe in the need to decarbonise the economy, because you want to be restoring nature, because you want to be safeguarding biodiversity etc, don't let the individual moments of this political downturn or whatever else it may be affect the way you think about this on a constant basis. narrow down the focus of what you're doing onto the thing that you can actually control and make that the thing that anchors you into the present reality. So, okay, I can't change who's in power right now. I can change how many of these products we get deployed out onto the market today. And just keep it down to the targets that are within your reach and within the controllables that you have. Yeah, I love that.
Katherine Keddie: I really resonate with that as well. I think one of the reasons that I went into the area of work that I did is the practical way in which you can see change happening. And I think one thing that I feel positively about when it comes to climate tech in the current environment is the vast majority of climate tech solutions are just better at what they do. They're more efficient. They're more localized. They work better for the context. Sometimes they're cheaper. A lot of the time they have a huge value add that goes alongside something that's more sustainable. And I think it's such a testament to human creativity and ingenuity that there are all these brilliant entrepreneurs and startups and people in large corporates as well and investors that are supporting new ideas and helping them scale to the point where not only are they more sustainable and they have lower carbon emissions, which is obviously crucial for the wider existential threat that we are facing of climate change, but also they are just better, more effective solutions that make people's lives easier. So I think on the positive side, I am reassured by the fact that these solutions are both of those things. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great way of thinking about it.
Juliette Devillard: What keeps you optimistic? What keeps me optimistic? I think I would say what keeps me optimistic is looking at some of the hard numbers and seeing that we have made progress in a whole variety of different ways, whether that be the number of offshore wind farms that have been deployed in the UK or across Europe, just the amount of countries that are now producing enough renewable electricity to function without any fossil fuels for X number of days per year. There's so many of these little wins or really big wins that we can be pointing towards in terms of actual infrastructure being built in terms of technologies that 20 years ago were not cost competitive becoming cost competitive. I mean I think I saw something recently about IKEA having rolled out a solar panel that you can attach to your balcony. I mean the idea of a furniture store making an energy solution available in such an easily accessible way. if you think about it, is another one of those just crazy major milestones where it's like, not only is this a technology that's cheap enough to be sold in a budget furniture store, but on top of it, it's a technology that's now so well thought through that we can install in that easy of a way that it's a, you know, cookie cutter, use a drill and put it on your balcony type of situation. I mean, there's a lot to this that is very positive. And obviously, I've mentioned mostly the energy side of things, but You can also look at the policies and the laws that we have coming in to request certain types of recycling standards or standards in how we produce things. There's quite a lot that we can also pat ourselves on the back for and go hey this is a heck of a lot better than it used to be. And so if we've done it with some types of technologies the hope is we can do it with more.
Katherine Keddie: That's true. I mean I think it's very easy to look at the news and be like everything's terrible but I think it is good like you say to look at this the bigger picture and be like things are improving and people are working on it and I think the people that I meet at Climate Tech Time and the people that I work with are just very smart, brilliant people, and I'm like, if they are on the case, then hopefully there was going to be some traction.
Juliette Devillard: Yeah, absolutely. The ethos of the level of intellect that is behind everything that's happening nowadays, yeah.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So one thing that I notice about your events is there seems to be an intentional approach to bring in a range of speakers and a range of different people. So there's a good diversity of thought in the room and there's always women, for example, who are represented as speakers. How do you approach that and what brought you towards that as a focus?
Diversity and gender balance in climate tech events and investment
Juliette Devillard: Yeah, well, I think you're speaking to the elephant in the room of climate tech having been a traditionally slightly more white and male-dominated field. Some of that is due to the very heavy engineering and science aspects to scaling some of the deep tech solutions that we're talking about and the predominance of, again, white men within those scientific and engineering-based fields. But the reality is that these are also just structurally reinforced things over decades and decades. We know, I think any activist in the climate space will tell you that for climate change and resilience and all of these different aspects to be worked on in the right way and for climate justice to be present, we need to have more diverse voices in the room. And that means both on a racial front and on a gender diversity front. And as different organisations within this space, we each have individually a duty to figure out how we can do that and how we can bring that balance back into the room. So in our case, we think about that quite intentionally with speakers. So Climate Tech Time, we have a specific mandate where we try to have diverse speakers on stage, not just consistently over the course of the entire year, but for each individual event. It's very rare for us to have an all-male set of speakers at Climate Tech Time. And that takes sometimes quite a lot of work because the reality is that we're not quite there yet in terms of the real balance of people who currently work in this field. And so you do have to look a little bit harder and build relationships with people from all different sorts of backgrounds to be able to do that. But it's worth doing. It's work that is necessary and that we need to continue doing both as an organization as Climate Connection but also individually within our own organization. So it may not be for speakers for other people but it may be in terms of what suppliers are you going with. do you have a mandate that says, hey, we should be trying to work with clients of different backgrounds, we should be trying to buy our products from different diverse companies, and how can you build that in? Now, perhaps one could say this is at the moment a controversial thing to be saying when the United States is backtracking on a heck of a lot of procurement diversity and gender diversity and really any kind of intentional policy that builds diversity as a consideration into who you're working with. But I think in the UK, we still stand for those values. And I'd like to believe that we're going to continue working on that, not just as a country, but also specifically in this climate tech ecosystem.
Katherine Keddie: I mean, the wider context for climate tech is also that a very small amount of VC funding and investment goes into, let's say, female founders. What do you think that we can do I guess as a climate tech community to better support fundraising for female founders and their ability to be able to access the capital that they need to scale new solutions?
Juliette Devillard: I'd say there's some really great people working on these different topics at the moment. Certainly at Climate Connection we think about it a lot. We run events that are specifically for female founders where we're bringing investors in the room that we know are willing to invest in female founded companies where we're connecting them again with the resources that they might need from our community partner program and beyond. But there are also other organizations out there working on this. So I would point you towards The Table as a really great VC fund that's been looking into this and that's running different projects. Carmel Rafaeli is really fantastic in the work that she does supporting female founders also on an individual basis. And I think that is so needed because it's not just kind of the events or the overall trends that we need but also the one on one introductions pushing things through giving people extra support to rectify the imbalance that kind of exists in the ecosystem by default.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I mean, another one that immediately comes to mind for me is Ada Ventures. They're very, I mean, their thesis is to summarise there's a huge opportunity of talent that's been missed. How can we capture it? Which I also think is a really positive and realistic way to look at the situation. You know, it kind of goes beyond some of the debates around intentional inclusion policies and focuses more on there is value here to be captured. Why would you not capture it? You know it's kind of a logical argument in that respect.
Katherine Keddie: So looking broadly at the community that you've built, is there anything that we, and by we I mean climate tech professionals, can be doing better to support each other to create that positive change?
Community-building as practical infrastructure for scaling
Juliette Devillard: I think it's the point I made earlier. It's the idea of zooming in on what you can work on and forgetting about the rest. Let's stop giving as much attention as we do to the macro trends of Trump doing whatever next inappropriate thing it is on the environmental front. And let's start giving more attention to, hey, I bought a product from one of the sustainable companies that I met at this event. Hey, I'm choosing to bring in sustainable suppliers within the business that I'm already running. Or hey, I'm just going to not read the news today and write an extra handful of emails out to potential clients that could be helping me to scale this potentially sustainable business. And I think bringing it back down to actions that we can control, to people that we know are trustworthy and are working on great projects, that's I think what we could be doing more of is let's stop getting too stuck on those big overarching trends and let's focus on what we have right in front of us. Like personal wins. Personal wins, again supporting businesses that you believe in, buying from the right types of suppliers, continuing to green our own internal supply chains, yeah, into community support in that sense.
Katherine Keddie: I love that and climate check time and generally the events you have are a good platform for that to happen. Okay, as we come to the end, I would love to know if you have any specific asks for the people listening, anything that you want to flag that's coming up that people might want to get involved with.
Climate Connection's Community Partner Programme and Connection Studio
Juliette Devillard: Yeah, we always have ongoing events. Climate Tech Time, for anyone who's listening who hasn't yet been, is the UK's biggest event for climate tech every month. We get about 150 people coming together and they range from startup founders to startup employees to investors to large corporations, SMEs, people who are helping climate tech startups to scale. It's a really, really fascinating and interesting crowd. the kind of level of expertise in the room, but also the different verticals that are covered is just really, really cool to see. You'll have people from an energy background, from a food background, from a construction background, all in the same room. And that creates such an interesting diversity of thought with the way that we approach these events and the interactions that happen. So I say, yeah, come to Climate Tech Time. If you're a founder, you should check out the Founders Connect series. That's one that we run in collaboration with Prosemino and British Land. British Land are building some really amazing campuses in Canada Water, but also at Central London with access to lab spaces and all sorts of different support that can be really helpful for startups that are trying to find a place to scale, particularly on the deep tech end of things. And yeah, with Founders Connect, we've basically been creating an event that is just about the founders, where everything that is at that event is oriented towards helping them to scale and grow, not having any investors in the room, not having any job seekers in the room, enabling a type of honest conversation that you often don't get access to, while at the same time making a lot of resources such as those free office hours available beforehand. Lots to do on that front. And then the last thing I would just say is one of the cool and exciting things that we've done recently is we've launched Connection Studio. So Connection Studio is a branch of Climate Connection where we're bringing all of the experience design and events design expertise that we've developed over the last three years of running Climate Connection and we're making that available to clients in climate but also beyond. So if you're looking at how can I be creating really impactful events that maybe bring in more customers or reinforce my existing customer base or how can I be growing my brand within a sector whether that's climate or beyond in a way that's actually interesting and sustainable and going to create community over time then we are now basically open for business on that front. So we're working in a consulting capacity and in a partnership capacity with people who want to run white label events that aren't necessarily represented under the Climate Connection brand and can really kind of re-up their strategy and help them to achieve their goals in that way.
Katherine Keddie: Stuff, okay. So watch this space. We'll have relevant links in the episode description so you can check out Juliette on LinkedIn and all the events that she just mentioned. And if you want to catch Climate Tech Time, it's very likely that I will also be there. So yeah, I think that's fantastic. Any final thoughts if you were to sum up like one key takeaway for the audience that you would like to share, what would that be?
Juliette Devillard: I think I'll come back to the piece that we spent a little while on, which is, you know, what do you need to be effective in scaling what you're working on? So take a moment. That's my call to action. Take a moment to go back to the part of this episode where we talked about that. Think about, you know, how much are you taking care of yourself? Who are those three people on the professional and personal side that you could be building those relationships with and really think about that ecosystem support that you need to be able to continue this work.
Katherine Keddie: I love that. Okay, perfect. What a note to end on. I'm going to be doing that straight after this episode. So thank you so much, Juliette, for everything that we've discussed today. And you can catch us on the next episode of Scaling Green-Tech. Thank you so much.
Juliette Devillard: Bye.
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