Jon Powers: Welcome to Experts Only podcast sponsored by CleanCapital and learn more at cleancapital.com. I’m your host Jon Powers. Each week, we explore the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance with leaders across the industry. Thank you so much for joining us. Jon Powers: Thanks for joining us today for an Experts Only podcast. You can learn more and get more episodes at CleanCapital, our sponsor’s website, cleancapital.com, and learn about our billion-dollar partnership with CarVal Investors and some of the work that we’ve got going on revolutionizing the clean energy finance space. Really excited today because we’ve got an amazing guest who is a legend in the space, Nancy Pfund, who’s now the managing partner of DBL Partners, Double Bottom Line Partners. But Nancy’s been working across so many parts of the industry and using the power of venture capital to promote social change, environmental improvement. She sits on boards that include Advanced Microgrid Solutions, Off-Grid Electric, Primus Power and had been on the board of Tesla Motors and SolarCity as well. Jon Powers: Fortune has named her one of the world’s top 25 eco innovators and Fast Company has her in the 2016 list of most creative people in business. But what I really enjoy about today’s conversation is we really look back in Nancy’s career and how she ended up doing some of the work that she’s doing and how she views the world and the investments they’re making. What I really love that she talks about is how companies can never take for granted the consistent shifting landscape. And I think that’s a theme you hear throughout this podcast when you’re looking at policy and innovation and finance. So, I hope you enjoy the conversation. Jon Powers: Nancy, thank you so much for joining us on Experts Only podcast. Nancy Pfund: My pleasure, Jon. Thanks so much for inviting me. Jon Powers: You’ve got an amazing background. First of all, I can’t even imagine how you schedule your life because there’s in between the companies you’re working with and the nonprofits and education. But I really want to step back for a second and talk about how you ended up getting into the space. As we were talking off air, you studied anthropology at Stanford. What led you from that to a career focused on innovation in the environment? Nancy Pfund: Yeah, well, it isn’t the most linear route for sure, but there is a path there that has worked well for me. Basically, when I studied anthropology at Stanford, of course, I did all of the usual studying of non-Western societies but what I did is I came back and got a master’s and used the anthropological method to study what happens between scientific elites and the lay public in our society. And so, I was really interested in issues of language and culture and small group kind of decision-making, the non-verbal aspects of scientific expertise, how that was infused in policy and decision-making. And so, I wrote my thesis on the recombinant DNA controversy at the time and studied how people make decisions. And it turned out that no surprise, but back then it was kind of novel that people bring their demographic and psychographic profile to bear when they make decisions about science and technology. And it isn’t always that sort of objective enterprise that we all like to think it is. Nancy Pfund: And so, from that, it really got me interested in innovation and how does scientific progress happen. And then I had a parallel interest in the environment. The day after I graduated, I went to work as an intern at the Sierra Club in Washington, D.C. Jon Powers: That’s interesting. Nancy Pfund: Yeah, that’s been a passion of mine from a very early age. I got to work on the Alaska Wilderness Protection Act. So really, the seeds were being sown back then for me to really go after sustainability in the early years. Of course, it wasn’t from an investment or commercial point of view. It was from policy and advocacy, but also to knit together that scientific community and engineering leadership with how do you actually get things done in the real world where people aren’t all engineers and they’re not all scientists and they bring their baggage with them, frankly. I hope when I describe it that way, it makes perfect sense that I would really be interested in the passing of the torch from a very carbon-intensive 100 years of the last century to a clean energy economy and all the flotsam and jetsam that goes along with that. If it were just the numbers or just the science, we would have been there, done that, and moved on to something else by now. Jon Powers: Do you feel like you could go back and rewrite your thesis now sitting in these boardrooms where you’ve got scientists and leaders and others wrestling with these big decisions? Nancy Pfund: It’s deja vu all over again, many times. And also, the whole culture of entrepreneurs and the profile of entrepreneurs as being change agents. It’s very reminiscent of who in a society actually makes things happen. That’s what anthropologists, one of the things they think about and how does that work. And so, the parallels are there. And so, while of course I’m all in for STEM and have worked on those issues, I also feel if anthropology is your path or social science, go for it because there is a huge component to what we do now that requires that expertise. Jon Powers: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I was an elementary education major. If it wasn’t for the army, I’m not sure where I’d be today. Nancy Pfund: Well, there we go. Jon Powers: So you’re interning at Sierra Club, how do you end up making the decision to go back to Yale for an MBA and then what led you into the venture capital side of that? Nancy Pfund: Well, going to the Yale program for me was the way that I could feel comfortable getting a business degree. It’s very hard to imagine today. But when I was in college, business school was not as popular and in fact it was somewhat controversial. But when I was in Washington and then I worked at Stanford Medical School on a book about these kinds of issues, I saw firsthand that while policy and NGOs and not-for-profits played a key role that really innovation was up to the private sector to scale. And so, I realized that I had this big gaping hole in my knowledge set. I did not know anything about business because I hadn’t really, frankly, been interested in it. So I applied to the Yale program. It was the only place I applied. It was because at the time, and still today, the Yale program offered you that business training, but with an infusion of other sectors, NGOs and the public sector, which I had worked in. Nancy Pfund: And so that was important to me and gave me the lexicon. It gave me the tools to understand how business works and then of course, you have to roll up your sleeves and do it to truly get it. And so, I worked at Intel for a few years, had the pleasure of working for one of the founders there, Bob Noyce. And Intel at that time was sort of like what Google and Facebook are today. I mean, it was a very young company, very exciting, still is today but obviously, it’s an older company. I loved that. I loved the communication of technology to the marketplace, which was something I hadn’t done and also got involved in policy with Bob Noyce. Nancy Pfund: And really the decision to go into investing was more a personal decision. I was engaged to be married. I was going to be living in the East Bay. And frankly, I did not want to commute down to Santa Clara. Everyone was always so shocked that I thought you always wanted to do this. Well, invention is the mother of necessity. I had to find a job in San Francisco so that I could not spend my life commuting. Even back then, in the early ’80s, it was a nightmare. And the only wrinkle in that is that there were no tech companies in San Francisco back then. That’s another thing that people forget. It just hadn’t happened yet. What was going on was on the peninsula. And so that opened my eyes to, well, what is in San Francisco is the finance side of innovation, of tech. And so, I was able fortunately to get a job at Hambrecht & Quist. Bill Hambrecht, one of the early backers of the tech revolution and he was also one of the few people in the industry back then that was super active in politics. So coming to H & Q allowed me to pursue my passion in terms of work, but also my passion for an advocation, which was getting involved in politics. Jon Powers: Yeah. You really blended those well throughout your career. Obviously, the business side, the technology side, the politics, but I think you’ve got a really deep understanding. You have spoken about this publicly, but the deep understanding of policy and the critical role policy can play, especially in the energy space. And I feel like there’s so many entrepreneurs that don’t think about policy until it’s too late. It really affects whether it be the regulatory structure of their company or how they’re going to enter a market. In those experiences, how do you now take the message of policy into boardrooms or leaders that you’ve worked with and what do you tell them? Nancy Pfund: Well, it’s been a journey for sure. You’re exactly right. Most entrepreneurs, especially 10 years ago, weren’t really interested in policy. In fact, many of them don’t like it. They’re entrepreneurs for a reason, to be unfettered and go after that marketplace opportunity. However, what I’ve seen and been encouraged by is that the smart entrepreneurs, as soon as they realize that, “Oh, there is a Public Utility Commission or there is the Investment Tax Credit that gets voted on in Washington.” They’re quick learners and even though many of them still don’t like it, the best of them embraced it or hired people that would embrace it. And so, it’s been an education for many and for all of us, really. I mean, we had no idea how politicized this field would become. Jon Powers: Right. Nancy Pfund: But now that it’s out there and we see the benefits of engaging, you’re not going to win every battle of course, but you win more than you lose because we’ve got the public on our side. We’ve got cost reductions on our side. We’ve got global attention to climate change on our side. So it’s a pretty rewarding activity. And so, I just take the pulse. It’s not like if you want to be backed by DBL, that you have to love policy. That’s not it at all, but you just have to recognize that it’s important and figure out a way to win at it and that’s where we try to help. Jon Powers: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, having spent the last 15 years in Washington and seeing how many companies need help building that bridge between Silicon Valley and D.C., I’ve always had the belief that understanding policy really helps you understand where the market is going to, not just was it Wayne Gretzky that said, “Skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been,” and understanding policy helps you figure out where to get a foothold and open up opportunities. Nancy Pfund: Exactly. And I think that there’s been a learning that while policy can be difficult and can block some markets, it can actually catalyze markets. And so, it pays to understand it and jump in. Jon Powers: So I want to come back to some impact investing stuff in a little bit, but I really want to talk for a little bit also about leadership and you’ve had I think an amazing career to serve on some really interesting boards, including Tesla and SolarCity and now Advanced Microgrid Solutions and others. You witnessed the growth and scales of companies that are really disrupting and really transforming the energy landscape at the highest levels. So when you sit in those leadership meetings and have conversations about where folks are going, what are some of the lessons that you’ve pulled out that you can share with other founders or CEOs? Nancy Pfund: Well, one of the lessons is to never take for granted the shifting landscape around you, be that technical, costs, incumbents, policy, or all of the above because the most dangerous thing you can do is to become complacent or to think that you’ve solved a problem. And so, one of the most important lessons to learn is that there’s always change and you’re always vulnerable. You don’t have to go around being paranoid and think that the world is going to crumble around you at every turn, but you do have to be mindful of what’s coming up ahead, both on the good and the bad side. And so, I think that seeing board discussions, one example would be the early days of solar. It’s hard to believe the rooftop solar folks didn’t think that much about utilities. Nancy Pfund: They just thought it’s really cool to put solar on your roof and that’s what we’re going to do. And we’re going to find a way to finance it so it’s more accessible. And it was only a few years in that people began to understand that the utilities actually had a role here. And so, what you saw over that ensuing decade was a growing awareness, went through all of the stages of denial, of suspicion, of trying to work together. I mean, we’ve seen it all and we’ve lived it all, but the best companies were able to navigate through that and become more productive and functional even though the terrain was far more treacherous than they thought going in. Jon Powers: Interesting, I feel like the landscape continues to shift specifically in the energy space. I would love to talk about what you sort of see as the most exciting innovations I think that are coming, obviously probably places where I imagine DBL is investing and also maybe where you see some missed opportunities, right? Like where do you see things that maybe should be being developed that aren’t or maybe just aren’t there yet? Nancy Pfund: Well, there’s no shortage of opportunity. We clearly believe, looking at our portfolio, the transportation that distributed storage and distributed clean energy along with sort of increasingly powerful AI like software are enormous trends. And the ability now to work with utilities and regulators that have figured out that all of this can be good for the grid. It can be good for cost reduction. It can be good for the customer choice issue. This didn’t exist even five years ago. And so, an Advanced Microgrid Solution that pulls together the storage assets with the generation, but also with the load reshaping and real time that allows more effective grid management and cost management. This is our future and it’s just beginning to happen at bigger and bigger bite sizes. That is something that we see as inevitable because in the end, even though there’s dislocation of various players, everyone’s going to win in this scenario and so that we really like. Nancy Pfund: As both financial and impact investors, we love the emerging markets opportunity because there you don’t really have the incumbent that you have here. And so, in some ways you’re able to move a little more quickly even though you do have other risks. So our investment in a company like Off-Grid Electric now called ZOLA Electric that brings distributed storage, solar, and efficient appliances to homes and businesses in Africa. That checks all boxes. If we don’t provide cheap, clean electricity to that continent, we’re going to have trouble because most of the population growth over the next 50 years is happening in Africa and Asia. Africa is going to double by 2050. Nancy Pfund: So we’ve got to do something to supply the electricity that will build the economic framework going forward. And the good news is that we can do that. We have learned so many lessons from the U.S. experience that now we can apply to Africa, let Africans fund it, let Africans run it, but allow them to leapfrog. And we’re beginning to see that with technologies that we can’t even get here, the ability to create self-assembling grids to go in and out of the dysfunctional grid that you may have in Nigeria, where you only get power a few hours. Yeah, I mean, but all of that requires technical innovation as well as a huge feet on the street in Africa. And so, we’re incredibly bullish on that. And what a lot of people don’t understand is that they’re tiny. They’re much smaller than U.S. installations. There are many, many more installations in Africa than there are in the U.S. and that’s just going to continue and you’re going to get higher functionality. Jon Powers: So we work at the intersection of clean energy and fintech and what’s interesting, I actually went back to your alma mater at Yale and gave a recent talk about what’s happening for the unbanked, right? The folks in places like Sub-Saharan Africa who now have access to financial institutions for the first time through their cell phones, which are then powered by, in many cases, distributed energy systems. They don’t have a centralized grid. They don’t have a centralized banking. It’s amazing progress that’s happening there because of some of the technologies that we’re developing, but also technology that they’re developing. Nancy Pfund: Yeah. All of it’s being paid with cell phones. I mean, it’s amazing. Jon Powers: How do you due diligence and make decisions and maybe that’s where the impact investing comes in. I would like to talk about that in a second, but how do you do due diligence of a portfolio company that’s doing work in emerging markets like that where the business model can be completely different than a company that’s doing a microgrid in Southern California, for instance? Nancy Pfund: Good question. Especially for us, because our roots when we were a part of JPMorgan were hyperlocal. We only invested in the Bay Area. So the notion that we’re investing in a company in Tanzania and Rwanda and Cote d’Ivoire is a big leap. We didn’t do it until our third fund. We didn’t do it without wrapping ourselves around the opportunity with friends and family, with people that we knew, from working with them, that they could get through the inevitable troubles that you have as an early company. Nancy Pfund: And so when we invested in Off-Grid, the first time we learned about it was when I was on the board of SolarCity because SolarCity made an investment in the company because they just felt it was very compelling. Of course, the Rive brothers are from South Africa so they had a personal interest. I learned a lot about that company being a board member. And also, they have a technology component that’s here in San Francisco. And so while most of the action is in Africa, there is a core here and so we were able to get very good visibility on that and help them augment the technology for these, for example, these self-assembling grids that we’re talking about with technology from this region. It wasn’t as foreign as people think, both in terms of the people involved and some of the technology underpinnings. And so we felt we know a lot about this market. We’ve been in it for many, many years. We have a lot of great contacts in the development community. We thought this is the kind of company that we can take a risk on because while it is unfamiliar in many respects, there are a lot of familiar aspects to it. Nancy Pfund: We also felt that in investing in this company, there would be some pretty important signaling going on that it would be, “Wow, DBL is investing in this company” and they invested early in Tesla, in SolarCity, in PowerLight, et cetera, Nextracker so they must know something we don’t. And so we were hopeful that we would help to legitimize this sector and region. We didn’t do it ourselves obviously, but we did help make that happen because we had corporates come into the round. We have EDF, Total. We helped to get them excited. And then, we were able to develop some first ever loan products that brought in some impact investors to cover the cost of the panels. That was the first. And now, fast forward to today, we’ve brought in a Nigerian-based VC firm that led the last round, which was something we always wanted to have happen. We never wanted us to be just Western people backing African entrepreneurs. Jon Powers: I’m going to get to DBL as a whole and impact investing, but I just have to ask since we were talking offline and my background, I got into this space because of my time spent in Iraq, in the Army, and then working at the Pentagon on energy security on our forward operating bases. Are you seeing any, I hate to use the word tech transfer, but from stuff that maybe the military is doing in these forward operating bases into companies that are doing work in Sub-Saharan Africa or vice versa? Whether it be I think about stuff that’s needed in Afghanistan from solar-powered water filtration systems, for instance, or advanced microgrids. It’s a very similar concept when the military’s building these forward operating bases. Nancy Pfund: Well, we’ve been very supportive of the military involvement in clean energy and also grateful for it because they do have these extremely compelling use cases, especially storage, very early backer and some of our storage companies, their first systems went into military bases. Also, the rooftop solar for bases and such. I haven’t really focused on that with our Africa company yet, to my knowledge, but I’m sure it’s on the horizon. I think that the partnership between the various military organizations and this move to a distributed clean energy future is one of the best stories out there. Jon Powers: Let’s come back to DBL. For folks who don’t know DBL Partners, DBL stands for Double Bottom Line venture capital. It really hits on the work you’re doing, both investing and impact investing. Can you talk a little bit about starting DBL and where the idea came from? Maybe add some color for folks that aren’t as familiar with the idea of impact investing? Nancy Pfund: Sure. What happened is that when I… I mentioned I went to work in Hambrecht & Quist. And I basically stayed there and I would’ve stayed there my whole career, I think. I worked there for 24 years. And then, the company went public and then we were acquired by Chase and then Chase acquired JPMorgan, which is how we ended up as part of JPMorgan for our first fund that gave us tremendous support to build the impact effort. What happened along the way at H&Q is that I got into venture capital, started as a securities analyst, but started investing in instrumentation stocks, and then developed a very early environmental fund in the ’90s with Bill Hambrecht, which made some good investments that was way too early. Then I just became a more traditional tech and life science investor. Nancy Pfund: At the same time, this is when tech was being discovered by Washington and vice versa. President Clinton and Vice President Gore would be traveling to Silicon Valley a lot. We got involved. TechNet was created. We were one of the founding members of TechNet. And so I got the job of managing all that, but frankly, because no one else in our firm wanted to, and I loved it. I thought, “Hey, I love investing, but I also love policy stuff and getting Silicon Valley more sophisticated in the game.” What happened is that the Bay Area Council, one of the regional business groups that we were a member of, and that is a leader here today, this is when the dot-com boom was happening. They were getting criticized by community groups saying, “Hey, all this dot-com wealth isn’t really helping Richmond or Oakland.” It’s the same old, same old. Nancy Pfund: The Bay Area Council said, “Well, let’s develop funds to pay attention to place.” They had a real estate fund and then they wanted a small business fund. They came knocking on our door to say, “Would you raise this fund and invest in it and invest in high potential companies, but help them create jobs in neighborhoods that need them, in low-income neighborhoods?” My boss at the time, Dan Case, who sadly passed away very soon after of brain cancer, but he said, “Nancy, you should do this.” There was a lot of change going on because we had just been acquired by Chase. He said, “You love investing, but you also love this policy stuff and you had two jobs. This fund would enable you to have one job and do them both.” I couldn’t deny that that was true, although I never considered myself… I like backing entrepreneurs, I never considered myself as an entrepreneur. That took me a while to get comfortable with that. Nancy Pfund: But we just set upon a course. I had a small team. I encountered many difficulties, especially after the dot-com crash when people had lost a lot of money in their venture portfolios. The last thing they wanted was a new venture fund, especially this do-gooder fund that was going to pay attention to jobs. But we persevered. Ford was our first investor. We got MacArthur. We got a bunch of banks who were able to invest because of the CRA aspects. When we invested in low-income neighborhoods, they got credit. We were off to the races. It’s funny, we didn’t ever position it as a sustainability fund because that wasn’t apparent in 2002, 2003. But by 2004, when we were up and running, we began to see that there were some companies around PowerLight, our first solar investment was creating great jobs in a low-income neighborhood of Berkeley and we were like, “Oh, okay, that’s what we’re supposed to do.” Nancy Pfund: So I was able to tap into my own background in sustainability and apply it to the mission of our fund and pretty much morphed those together. That was one of the reasons we looked at Tesla early on. It was like, “Wow, if there’s a big car plant that employs a lot of people, and maybe it will be in a region of California, of the Bay Area that really needs those jobs.” We checked all the boxes that’s traditional venture investors in terms of wanting to have a successful management team and product line. But we also brought that impact lens and it turned out to be very powerful, the combination of work. And so we got through the 2008’s downturn and that was a really difficult year for everybody, but especially for us. Some of our companies were in peril at that time. Nancy Pfund: And so, finally, we got through that and Tesla went public in 2010. We had sold PowerLight to SunPower. So things were getting to be quite positive. And so we spun out of JPMorgan to create DBL in 2008. From there, we’ve grown and are now on our third fund. That first fund I talked about was a $75 million fund and our last fund that we raised in 2015 was 400 million. So we’ve been able to benefit from the growing opportunity and the fact that entrepreneurs are all in for impact increasingly, as well as help to shape this field that we now call impact investing. Jon Powers: Fantastic. Did you meet Ira along the way? Did you meet him at JPMorgan? Like, how did you guys decide to spin this out? Nancy Pfund: Yeah, Ira was, of course, an early, early clean energy investor. We met each other during that period. We really got to know each other and liked each other when we were both on the Tesla board and going through very intense growing pains, which others have chronicled, but we definitely lived through that and saw that we approached investments the same way, approached problem solving the same way. And so as we were thinking about our third fund and he was thinking about his next fund, we just said, “Well, wow, rather than just do this separately, why don’t we just join forces?” And so we were thrilled to create DBL Partners as the blend of the clean tech practice of technology partners where Ira had built such a great franchise and DBL investors. That’s how we came to create DBL Partners. Jon Powers: Interesting. As we were talking before, I just moved my family literally last week from Washington, D.C. to New York. I didn’t mention that we’re moving to Buffalo, New York. CleanCapital’s headquarters is in New York City. I’m from Buffalo originally. I have actually full belief in the fact that this part of the Midwest and the other areas has so much to add to the innovation economy and it has not been tapped enough. We’re actually opening our second office in Buffalo because of that. Nancy Pfund: That’s fantastic. We’re all in for that too. I mean one of our more recent areas of focus is food and agriculture. Thirty percent of carbon, of course, is generated in agriculture. Forty percent of the world’s population works in agriculture. And we have almost 10 billion people to feed over the next several decades. It’s not sustainable and farmers are losing their land. And so one of the themes that we’re investing around is that and also bringing together the coasts with America’s heartland. We have a big data company called Farmers Business Network that does just that. It helps farmers aggregate data. So we have 25 million acres of data. And we see that one farmer on one end of the county in Iowa is paying 30% more for the same seed that his neighbor is. There’s been a lack of transparency. So we’re able to solve a lot of those problems and enable the farmers to make better decisions. We’re helping them go organic by giving them more of a sense of what it costs and what the risks are and what the benefits are. Nancy Pfund: So it’s funny, I tweeted something a few weeks ago. I forget what Farmers Business Network had done, but I ran into them, the founders, on the streets of SF. There was a story about that. Someone tweeted, “You meant San Francisco for SF, but did you know the largest office for FBN is SF, meaning Sioux Falls, South Dakota,” which I love and we all love. Because the more we can bring together the coasts with America’s heartland and help… America’s first entrepreneurs really were farmers. Help level the playing field and make agriculture work again. A lot of business opportunities, investment opportunities, but also a lot of healing opportunities for our country. Jon Powers: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Well, thank you. There’s so much we could talk about and I feel like we could go on forever. I do have one question I always ask every one of our listeners. If you could go back to yourself, probably even before you studied anthropology at Stanford, coming out of high school, or even coming out of college, if you could give yourself one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself? Nancy Pfund: That one is pretty easy for me because as I’ve talked about how crossing sectors is so important to my career and to solving problems, the thing is when I first started, I didn’t do that. I mistrusted business. I had a chip on my shoulder like the Sierra Club was the best place, the NGOs. I got rid of that chip on my shoulder. I still love those organizations. But I learned very early to change that attitude and to work across different stakeholder bases and create unity and bridges rather than enforce your opinions and stereotypes. That’s what I would recommend. Jon Powers: Such an important message today, especially with all that’s going on politically across this country. Nancy Pfund: Yes, yes. That could be the whole subject that we can really talk about. Jon Powers: Yeah, totally, totally. Nancy, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Nancy Pfund: Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. And again, thanks so much for having me on your show, Jon. Jon Powers: Absolutely. Well, we’ve covered quite a bit in today’s conversation. Venture capital, impact investing, the energy space, and anthropology can lead you to an incredible career in innovation and environment. And I want to thank Nancy for joining us and have a special thanks for our producers, Lauren Glickman, Emily Connor, and our intern, Greg Phillips for their work. You can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. And as always, I look forward to continuing our conversation. Jon Powers: Thanks for listening in today’s conversation. Find more episodes on cleancapital.com, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and leave us a five-star review. We look forward to continuing our conversation on energy, innovation and finance with you.