Atlas Berry, founder and general partner at Mission One Capital, delves into funding mission-driven founders who focus on frontier technology solutions to sustainability challenges. Atlas discusses the significance of sustainability to him personally, highlights the specific areas of climate tech his venture capital firm targets, and explores current trends in the industry. He provides deep insights into sustainability opportunities and shares valuable advice for entrepreneurs interested in this sector.
Atlas Berry, founder and general partner at Mission One Capital, delves into funding mission-driven founders who focus on frontier technology solutions to sustainability challenges. Atlas discusses the significance of sustainability to him personally, highlights the specific areas of climate tech his venture capital firm targets, and explores current trends in the industry. He provides deep insights into sustainability opportunities and shares valuable advice for entrepreneurs interested in this sector.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[1:41] 'Jason Bourne meets banking': The fascinating early career journey of Atlas Berry.
[5:22] How corporate development experience paved the way for a venture capital role.
[6:33] The inception of Mission One Capital: Identifying software-driven solutions to climate issues.
[12:17] Guidance for founders tackling climate and sustainability challenges: Understand the problems in these areas and respecting regulatory constraints.
[16:35] The importance of addressing human issues for successful sustainability solutions.
[20:22] Emerging trends in climate tech, including energy, mobility, carbon markets, circularity, and environmental management.
[26:00] Why timing is crucial in evaluating sustainability-focused investment opportunities.
The non-profit organizations that Atlas is passionate about: The Nature Conservancy
About Atlas Berry
Atlas Berry is the founder and general partner at Mission One Capital. He began his career in investment banking at JPMorgan, working in Mergers & Acquisitions across New York, Johannesburg, and London. Notably, Atlas established the venture arm for the Grammy-award-winning rock band Linkin Park, where he led investments in high-profile companies such as Lyft, Robinhood, and Impossible Foods. Additionally, he is a two-time TEDx keynote speaker, has mentored at Techstars and the MIT Startup Accelerator, and has served on the Technology Advisory Boards for New York City and Delta Airlines.
About Mission One Capital
Mission One Capital is a Silicon Valley-based early-stage venture capital firm specializing in ClimateTech and Equitable Access startups. The firm invests in seed-stage companies dedicated to creating a more sustainable and equitable future. Its portfolio includes innovative companies such as Zevvy, Twice, Helio, Cloverly, CHI, Derapi, UPFRONT, Carbonara, and others.
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Elon doesn't call it a climate company, and his real focus is making a car that's sexy, that is well priced, that you want to drive, that drives cool. Those are the human incentive reasons for why you buy a car. Is it cheap enough or, you know, well priced? Does it look cool? Like, am I going to get cool points for driving it? And does it look cool and drive cool? So I feel really good when I get into it.
Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision. Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host Gopi Rangan. My guest today is Atlas Berry. He's the founder and general partner at Mission One Capital.
Mission One Capital backs mission driven founders and the main focus is on frontier technology solutions to sustainability related problems. What does that mean? Why is this topic important? And how did Atlas get into the world of venture capital? He's been an active angel investor before and he decided to start his own firm.
Let's talk to Atlas and find out. Atlas, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
Atlas Berry: Awesome. Thanks for having me. Look forward to chatting.
Gopi Rangan: Tell us about yourself, starting with where you grew up. You grew up in New Jersey, but you lived in Paris for some time. But now you live in Miami. Tell us a little more about that story.
Atlas Berry: For sure. Um, I, I always say, uh, both from a business and personal side of how to secure his path to get to where I am, but, um, yeah, I grew up in New York, New Jersey, that's where my family's from. And, uh, if you're a true New Yorker, then I'll say I'm from New Jersey. If you're not from the reason I can kind of claim a bit of New York through my parents.
But yeah, kind of going from New Jersey up until middle school. And then when it came to high school, my whole family moved out to Paris, France. And so kind of taking myself from, you know, the armpit of America to the premium cultural hub in the world was definitely a culture shock, but, you know, really started to open up my eyes to a lot of the global issues, global economics, and which is what I ended up studying even in high school and kind of first got me interested in thinking about macro kind of larger existential threats and problems, which I guess came full circle later in life.
Gopi Rangan: I lived in France for about a year when I was in business school. I was in Fontainebleau. It's a fascinating country. There's a lot of rich history, good wine, very good cheese. I really enjoyed my time there as well. But you also, in your first job, you had a focus on Africa, Saharan Africa. You seem to have had a very broad global perspective much earlier in your life, starting with high school and later when you started your career as well.
Atlas Berry: Yeah, I think that so, so the interesting story there is that, after school, um, you know, went to UPenn undergrad, Wharton, did the whole banking thing out of school in New York. I found myself in New York doing traditional M& A investment banking. I was like, okay, well, this is interesting, but you know, that international global itch really started to kind of come to the forefront.
And so I found out about a small satellite office in Johannesburg, South Africa, that was doing, was really covering all of sub Saharan Africa and doing industries across metals and mining and real estate and financial institutions that were expanding through the region, et cetera. And so it was an opportunity for me to think about, okay, how do I go to an area where I've never been?
And I can get a really, I don't know, you know, high risk, high reward type of learning experience. And that was definitely, uh, what I got in sub Saharan Africa. Um, I would say kind of traditional M& A in New York, you move some Excel files here and there, you get a deal toy after a deal is done and you kind of move on to the next one.
But there, you know, we would travel all throughout the continent and kind of be in risk of our lives sometimes. And I got robbed twice while out there on business trips. And, um, you know, competing against Russian banks who have come with suitcases of cash to sell side engagements. So it was definitely kind of like what I call Jason Bourne meets banking.
And so that kind of frontier environment started to add to my risk tolerance later in life. Even after that, I tried to be an entrepreneur throughout sub Saharan Africa, because I saw so many opportunities. Eventually got kicked out of the country because my visa ran out after I left JPMorgan.
And I found myself in New York kind of figuring out what was next. And that was the start of of my operator journey when I finally bumped into an early-stage company. I joined as like the eighth employee and helped us grow to do 40 million in revenue. So it was kind of like a, you know, starting in Africa to end up being helping an operator is definitely, uh, you know, something I wouldn't have planned, but, uh, but an amazing experience.
Gopi Rangan: You had an immersive experience in different cultural contexts on how to do business in different parts of the world, and that kind of prepared you for your own entrepreneurial journey. You were a VP at Viacom at one point, and you were a CFO at a startup, and eventually you decided to start your own venture capital firm.
What was the genesis for that?
Atlas Berry: Yeah. So one part of the story that is hard to fathom, I guess, that really was a like pivoted point in me getting into venture. My entree into venture was that after working at that startup, I got poached from that startup to join a large talent agency in Los Angeles called Creative Artists Agency.
And they're one of the largest talent agencies in the world now, but at that time they were expanding internationally. And so folks like myself who had appetite to go into emerging markets we're getting brought in to really help from a corporate development standpoint and expand the entire company into the brick countries essentially is what I was covering.
And while doing that, I'd also meet all the international talent that would come through there. So we created a joint venture in India to get into Bollywood at the time. And so Indian actors were looking to come into the U S coming to Hollywood. So we'd help advise on that. Or US music talent would be wanting to do a world tour. And we think about how does a Justin Bieber tour throughout Brazil or something like that. Through that process, I met a lot of large global acts, Lincoln park, the rock band, was one of those folks who I met along that journey.
And really pitched them to join the agency, but that pitch became job opportunity to help join them, essentially run what became their family office and help them kind of go into a lot of areas, including venture. So we built a venture fund together and then I ran that fund for a number of years as a generalist fund.
And so had some good bets in there. You know, we did Robinhood, Lyft, Blue Bottle Coffee, Snapchat, Possible Foods and a bunch of others. And so I was like, okay, I have success in venture. I think I'm decent, or at least I'm lucky in venture. But how do I apply this to something that really speaks to what my skillset is, which are the larger global existential threats.
And that's when the climate kind of angle started to come into play. 2018 or so, you know, you're seeing generalist funds who had maybe either gotten burned from clean tech 1. 0 in the mid 2000s come back around or other funds are now seeing that whatever software is eating the world.
And there's more opportunities in areas just out of enterprise SAS. And now we can look at things like the energy grid and we can look at mobility and come to these like larger issues. And so anyway, climate tech became the new kind of hype thing around 2018 after the IPCC report, which is like a big climate report that explains all the problems: If we don't reach this level of decarbonization, how screwed are we kind of thing.
And through that as, okay, this is how bad it will be. But also for those who solve for these problems, look at these massive TAMs, you know, these massive opportunities of, wealth creation and generation. And so that's what got me excited to get into the climate tech space. And so as an angel investor, like you mentioned, I started always say, lose your own money before taking other people's money to lose theirs.
So in the process of doing that, I became an angel investor for about five or six years, really kind of learning by doing learning by investing. in all types of sectors, subsectors of the climate crisis. And through that learning eventually, you know, became to distill down my thesis of what Mission One Capital became.
Gopi Rangan: What a fascinating story! You're very humble. You say that you got lucky early in your venture career, but one never really knows whether he or she is a good venture capital investor until perhaps towards the end of their career. Early days, all you know is whether you're getting lucky or not. And. You took that faith and you became an angel investor, started investing your own money, and then you got that conviction that, okay, it's time to start a firm.
Tell us more about the new firm that you've started. What is the firm Mission One Capital about? And how is it different from other VC firms?
Atlas Berry: Sure. So part of the big insight that I think I unlocked early, which helped me to launch the firm is realizing that there's kind of two (probably more) ways to attack climate tech when it comes to venture capital.
Climate notoriously is a very macro. Problem. And so there are other types of asset classes of finance that can really do well in this space: project finance, infrastructure, finance, debt, et cetera. But venture and climate is really kind of played two ways. Let's say on one side you have the deep tech, hardware approach. So on that side of things, you're getting either, you know, people with a science background or understanding of the lab network in the U. S. Say, for example, ideas that are spinning out of the lab and going to commercialization. So investing at that inflection point, knowing that it's hardware, knowing that it's going to be a longer, maybe return profile or time horizon. And so potentially needing more patient capital. And so you get, you know, breakthrough energies of the world doing those type of things with Bill Gates, but the clear patient capital. And then on the other side, you have generalist investors or software investors who are looking at business models that they've seen in the generalist market. So enterprise SaaS, API based businesses, transactional businesses, marketplaces, et cetera, and then applying those business models to the sectors like energy and mobility and carbon markets.
And so looking at software forward approaches to climate, and using that as a way in and then eventually working yourself maybe to IOT as a commoditized component to the software and then maybe making your way toward hardware deep tech over time. And so that latter approach, that software forward approach is really what we ended up doing in mission one capital.
And that was what we saw as the initial insight. The other piece I think is really exciting to me at least to work on climate is that it is global. I've worked in every continent across the world, but for this specific start of Mission One, let's say we're starting in the U S and in Europe, um, having lived and worked on both sides, sometimes I feel even more comfortable in Europe in some regard.
So that's also a differentiator that I think provides us a competitive advantage because a couple of things. One is when it comes to climate in Europe, the regulatory environment is very different than the U S environment. And so they're almost more forward thinking when it comes to climate policy. And so you're seeing the implementation of different solutions come faster and the penetration of things like EV vehicles come faster in parts of Europe than you're seeing in the U. S. And so as an investor who invests in both sides, one of our differentiators we feel is our ability to see some of those trends of what does it look like when penetration looks like this? Or what does it look like when business models get created on top of the energy grid to allow for things to happen that can't happen in the future? You know, that take time to happen in the U S we might see them already happening in Europe and be able to kind of have a prepared mind. So what it could look like in the U S might be X, Y, Z, and we can invest along that kind of thought process. And so that U S Europe connectivity is a real big differentiator for us.
Gopi Rangan: I see that you've strategically thought about how to structure your investment thesis. You invest at the seed stage and you're broadly focused on US and Europe because that kind of feeds your investment philosophy. And you also invest in B2B and B2C. So it's a broad mandate. What's your advice to founders that focus on climate and sustainability related problems?
Starting a company is already difficult, and there are some unique challenges specific to this sector. What are some two or three things that you would like to share with founders so that they could be a lot more successful?
Atlas Berry: So I think there's like a couple different schools of thought, but but I think if I were to give advice to founders, there's two different types of founders.
There's founders, I think, in this space, um, that either have spent a lot of time in climate. So maybe they, you know, studied environmental studies in college or some sort of engineering that can be applied to, you know, things like weather forecasting or geospatial analysis, et cetera. And then they're going into kind of find solutions within a space or an industry that they already understand and they're looking to disrupt. Then there are other types of founders that I think are coming is from general market. We're being a general market founder, as I like to call it a generalist. Maybe they were creating, you know, a marketplace for dogs to dog walk them or whatever the idea might be.
But then they're saying, Okay, I really now understand marketplaces. You know, how do I apply that to a sector that may be more passionate about? And so they're coming in as an outsider and bringing new business models to archaic industries. And so I think both are really interesting. And one side, sometimes you need to have that institutional knowledge.
Like let's say in the energy space, like it's good to know how energy is distributed around the U S there are different corridors, different regulatory sectors, whether or not it's public owned or investor owned kind of utility companies, et cetera. You have to understand the nuances around that to be successful, I think. So that's like that first type of entrepreneur can be really successful.
However, I think sometimes also the malaise and the inertia of old archaic industries need to be disrupted with new concepts. So I think that's like the first thing is like, are you like which one of those buckets you're in as an entrepreneur? I think the second piece that's again, very specific to climate that I think, uh, could be helpful and also challenging, let's say, is the regulatory tailwinds.
So, or headwinds. So, you know, there are certain sectors that are going to really benefit from things like the IRA, the infrastructure bill, and other types of things that have opened up capital, whether it be straight grant related capital or tax incentives and other types of incentives to get things moving.
As a founder, I think really understanding, if you have tailwinds or headwinds from a regulatory standpoint is extremely key. And then the third piece, I think is super important that I always say when it comes to climate, it has to solve both the climate problem, but also it has to fit human incentive structures. You have to assume that corporates, although they have good intent, you have to sell to them in a way that they understand, which is profit and loss. And so there has to be a financial gain to who you're selling into, rather than a sustainability or value based sell. That big piece, to be honest, helps us vet a lot of companies when they talk about, Hey, this needs to happen. I'm like, okay, well, that's great. But is the incumbent incentivize to do that? Or are you finding new ways to incentivize incumbents to make those changes? If that answer isn't solved for, it's hard to get that initial product market fit. You're swimming against the tide of human incentive structures.
And so I think that's a little bit of nuance there, but that's a big, a big key there.
Gopi Rangan: So know the knowledge space really well. Understand the problem you're solving in the climate and sustainability topics. Have respect for regulatory restrictions, and there might be headwinds.
You have to have a plan for how to manage that. And thirdly. Make it economically viable and understand the human incentives of people who already exist in this field who will be affected by the solution that you're bringing into the world.
Atlas Berry: And probably an example is always, I say the Tesla story, it's the Tesla example.
Elon doesn't call it a climate company and his real focus is making a car that's sexy, that is well priced, that you want to drive, that drives cool. Those are the human incentive reasons for why you buy a car. Is it cheap enough or, you know, well priced, and does it look cool and drive cool? So I feel really good when I get into it. Let's put aside all the sustainability benefits, those incentive structures are built. So I personally have the Tesla. I bought it for those human incentive reasons. And then I'm like, Oh yeah. The sustainability benefit gives me that extra point, obviously, as a climate investor to be able to talk through, but those human incentives are extremely important.
Gopi Rangan: I can see what you mean by human incentives. Can you give an example of one of your startups that you've invested in? How did the first conversation happen? What were you looking for in that meeting? What questions did you ask the founders?
Atlas Berry: Yeah. So, there's always a ton of examples there. Let's talk about one more notable one that I think now they're really off to the races and it's a company called Charger Help.
So Charger Help, what they do, they essentially track and monitor EV charging infrastructure. And are able to, like, identify when the charging stations are operational or not operational and fix them. And so that's very much so what they do. Again, if we go back to some of the things I've mentioned in terms of founders, one is the founder, um, or Camille and Yvette. They had come from both the EV charging infrastructure and the human workforce development space previously. And so they're bringing some institutional knowledge and understanding how to do this before. However, they're tackling a new problem, which is based on some of the regulatory tailwinds, right?
EV charging infrastructure is a big piece of the infrastructure bill, the IRA, you know, making sure there's enough charging stations so that the EV adoption can happen. Is very much so in the regulatory limelight. And then also making sure those charging stations are operational. So people drive up to a charging station and actually works is also in the regulatory framework.
And so they have tailwinds behind them. When I first met them, they had a business that was very people driven, very manual and people driven, meaning they would find out that a charging station doesn't work in a certain location.
They would dispatch or roll a truck, a technician that was trained up to do this to the actual location. He or she would make the change and they'd come home and then they'd kind of bill for that service. So it was very, you know, manual and process. And you know, that's a great example of them solving the problem, but it's not VC scalable, right?
And so one of the big things that the changes that they made, I've been tracking them for quite some time after that first conversation to see if they could make the pivot from something that was very manual to something that was very scalable and what they did that I think was really that changed the game of the inflection of what the companies actually is and what they stand for and how they operate is that they created a way to actually pull log data remotely.
From the charging stations and almost monitored them remotely. And so as they bring in more and more customers, with thousands and thousands of charging stations, they can see them all from a centralized hub, right? And so they can remotely look at them, they can pull in log data, which they can then interpret to what the actual error might be in regards to the charging station being operational.
And in some cases, they can actually fix those things over the air so they don't have to actually send people to those locations. And so that change, moving to more of a SaaS software, kind of business model changed the game in terms of how their success has gone. I think they've had a real inflection point in terms of the business model going forward and they've just been off to the races, so.
Gopi Rangan: Oh, this is such a. painful problem. What used to be a five minute drive up to a gas station, fill your gas tank, and just move on with your life has now turned into a one hour episode where I have wait for the charging station to become available. And then I go up to the charge station to charge and that takes like 20, 30 minutes, maybe longer.
And when charging stations are broken, it's even more frustrating because there are charging stations installed, but only the four out of the six are actually functional. This is a very important problem to solve. I can see why this is needed in the world. Very exciting.
Atlas Berry: 100%. That's where range anxiety comes into play because people are saying, Hey, I want to buy an EV.
But then what if I can't charge it because of this issue? Even though, like, to be honest, like, if you look at the data, the majority of charging above 50 percent of the charging is happening at home. And most people don't drive past the actual, like, you know, mileage max of a charge. But you know, let's put that aside.
People still have anxiety around charging. And so you have to solve that human issue, regardless.
Yes,
Gopi Rangan: eventually it boils down to human issues. How many startups do you invest in on average, in a year? And what stage do you like to invest in? You know, seed is a broad definition, but if you could narrow it down to the kind of companies you like to talk to.
Atlas Berry: Yeah, for sure. So we invest in about 10 to 12 companies a year. So I think we're pretty active in that regard. We invest at the pre seed sometimes and seed based on a lot of the factors - things like traction, obviously, but valuation, team strength and size of the opportunity and other types of things.
And I can give examples even of that. So yeah, we do do that. And then the types of areas that we like to invest in a kind of broad, I would say when it comes to climate tech, I would put them in a couple different buckets. So energy, like I mentioned before, is an area that we're really interested in mobility, carbon markets, extremely interesting. We can go into that. Circularity, environmental management, as I like to call it, or like industrial type processes is another sector. So those are the like bigger, broader sectors though. But I think at any given time, when you talk to me, there's definitely specific. subsectors or trends that I'm really watching that I'm really excited about.
So, you know, if you want me to tell you some of those.
Gopi Rangan: Yes, let's get into it. What trends are you excited about?
Atlas Berry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What we like to do as well as have what we could, you know, every, every venture investor likes to talk about having a prepared mind, but Really I like to just call it nerding out on specific subtrends.
And then we try to find opportunities and then we see if we can find companies that are doing those things, sometimes in the way of just learning and understanding how those problems are being solved, um, even if they're a later stage company. It helps to inform us to identify maybe earlier stage companies that might be filling some gaps, but some areas now that we're really excited about that we've been nerding on about with the company - data center optimization. So when it comes to data centers, obviously we have this whole AI boom happening. And in the background, crypto is still gaining ground. And so both of those industries require a lot of compute, extremely heavy on the data center. You know, and so through that, there's a lot of heat and a lot of energy that's used when it comes to compute around these two types of processes or industries.
And so you'd be started to see a lot of companies focus on doing a couple of things, optimizing compute going into the data center, but also thinking about things like cooling of the data center itself, fueling the data center energy with renewable energy and making that easy and other types of things to just make that a more sustainable process.
Because if you think about the, the tailwinds of where our data center growth is happening, we definitely need to have the counterbalance of sustainability, to not like blow up our climate goals in the process of bringing extremely fast AI assistance to your iPhone.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah, the demand for data continues to explode. Connectivity has become more and more ubiquitous, and there's a lot of need for storage. And all of that kind of boils down to eventually managing data center infrastructure. And we need to be able to be efficient about that.
Atlas Berry: Another, another area that we really like.
So we start to think about as new renewable energy is getting deployed, it's getting deployed both from central sources like commercial-grade ;solar farms, et cetera, but also, residential, small business, community solar, kind of more distributed energy generation. And so when you have that type of setup, and if you think about projecting that out a bit, one of the areas that we're really excited to understand more is what we call the virtual power plant.
And so that's saying, what if you have distributed energy generation? So let's try to use this more layman's terms. Let's say across the US, there's whatever, thousands of people who have solar on their roof. What if you were able to map all those individuals together who are generating power and take the excess power that they're not using for their home and pledge that back and earn on that excess power in some way.
So there are different ways people are testing and trying this out, whether that be pledging energy back to the grid and offsetting energy costs as a result. There's pros and cons and different things to think about when it comes to some of that, especially when you talk about grids and utilities. There's conversations around just pushing that energy to others who would then buy that excess distributed energy, peer to peer, almost like energy generation and consumption and all of that.
And so with those mechanisms come underlying systems that have to get created to enable VPPs to operate, like how do you map where a certain electron came from and give people credit and pay them for that electron that they generated and vice versa. And so that's what's really interesting to us, like both from a, that's a solar example, but, but, you know, in Europe.
Where EV penetration is above 50 percent like in Norway, EV penetration is at 80 percent of all new vehicles or EV. People are starting to test EV type versions of that example as well. Like, can we pull together large amounts of EV vehicles and then use them as virtual power plants and almost like pledge them as both like demand response.
Like, so if energy peaks at a certain time, rather than going to peaker plants, which are very polluted run by coal and things like that, you can maybe go to this distributed energy source. Or just in general on a day to day, even kind of tap into this energy source. Cars are basically like mobile batteries.
Can you tap into them some way? So yeah, distributed energy and VPPs are very interesting to us as well.
Gopi Rangan: I see you're excited about many emerging trends in this sector. And I want to ask you about I can keep going.
Atlas Berry: I can keep going. Yeah, I
Gopi Rangan: can see that. We can spend a whole couple of hours on this. But I want to ask you about like, why do you say no when founders pitch to you?
Let's say you meet a founder and the founder is clearly passionate and knowledgeable about the space. They understand the regulatory side. Yeah. And they anticipate headwinds and they have a plan to manage that and they have the human side of the story. They understand how this can fit into the existing infrastructure and the way of doing business.
And they fit into the topics that you talked about, like either data center or energy management. But despite all of that, you would still say no sometimes. How many startups do you meet for the 12 investments you make in a year? And what's the most common reason for you to say no?
Atlas Berry: Yeah, we, you know, similar to other venture funds, most likely, know, we see a thousand companies a year and we're investing in 10 of them, you know, so a very small percentage and there's two reasons probably that I say, no, one is timing.
I think timing is a big piece because in venture, and specifically to my fund, we're not looking for 20 years before payback. I'm looking for a venture type returns, you know, so five to seven, you know, or so years till payback. And so you have to think about those macro trends that we talked about and when we think they're going to come online, you know, so.
In the background, we're, we're kind of projecting to ourself, okay, if someone comes to us with, let's say a geothermal company, let's just use it as an example on it, you know, geothermal currently is, I believe, maybe 1 percent of renewable energy right now. And so it's a very small percentage of the overall renewable story.
There are some challenges that make that so, uh, costs, you know, efficiency of, uh, siting an actual geothermal site to actually tap into and things like that. So there's. Very specific things that could be solved for with startups. So that's very interesting, but we have to believe that geothermal is going to become a larger percentage of the renewable story to invest into now within the next five to seven to 10 years to be able to make that type of bet.
Right. So that's a timing thing. And there are a lot of other examples where timing is a big issue. You know, we talked about penetration of EV vehicles, you know, in the U S we're now at, I think we just recently got to Eight to 10 percent or so of all new vehicles or you be in the U. S. Or something like that.
That's not 80%. And obviously that number needs to grow and it will. But what's the timing of that? Um, and so projecting out what the timing is. And so what are the knock on effects on different opportunities that founders are solving for? So I think timing is a big one. The second one, it's more of like, you know, probably how even you probably say no sometimes to startups because even if there are those two types of founders, one, one that comes from the industry and one that doesn't, right?
And I think the one who doesn't, some naivete is good, right? Not knowing the things that have set people back is very strong and positive, but like knowing the history is also important. So sometimes we see founders come in with kind of a naive understanding of the challenges that they're going to face, because we've seen a lot of companies that have tried this and failed.
Right. And so, you know, that could be one part on my side or on their side, but I think. Not having the knowledge, even if you don't come from that space is definitely a hindrance to your success. And so, you know, in some cases, even we've seen, I think we talked about it, like founders who were college dropouts and go into the insurance space, let's say for example, and are able to get product to market, but then you're always thinking like, That's great, but then do they know what that next leg up might look like?
And kind of them being blind to what the potential opportunities as they do grow because they didn't do that homework sometimes leads us to kind of say no.
Gopi Rangan: Starting companies is already hard and investing in companies, choosing one that you want to back is a very difficult decision.
I can see that you have a methodical approach to looking at these opportunities, finding the right kind of fit that works for you.
Atlas Berry: And also add on also at the early stage, the other piece that's like more of the feel right comes from the fact that I've been investing for the past decade and just been in this space for a while, is that kind of gut feel of I'm the founder, and they have to have this kind of mix of confidence slash, you know, bleeding on hubris slash like Charisma as a salesperson, not just to sell their product to us to invest, but also to be able to sell customers, to sell other employees and people to, you know, top notch people to join them.
And so that kind of like it factor on the founder side, I always like to see, okay, who out of the founding team is going to be that person and who out of the founding team is going to be the product lead or the technical lead. And I like when I see the two of them together to say, okay, someone's going to be heads down while one person's heads up, like an agent world.
When I was a talent agent, you always had, you know, one guy doing the hunting and one guy or gal or what doing the, like what the farming, you know, after things have been hunted and kind of the management of things once they're farmed. And so you need that kind of combination of those two characters to work well together.
And so I think those are the things we also look for.
Gopi Rangan: Very nicely said, especially at the pre seed and seed stage, so much depends on the team. It's good to see that the team can actually execute and you can see signs of that early in the days of the company. Yeah. We're coming towards the end of our conversation and I want to ask you about your community involvement.
Is there a non profit organization You are passionate about which one?
Atlas Berry: Sure. So in Miami, a big nonprofit that I like to work with here is the Nature Conservancy. And the Nature Conservancy obviously is one of the largest environmental based nonprofits in the world. But specific to Miami, I think what they've done really well is, you know, making sure that the environment is one of the key pillars in all the government conversations, especially around government budgets and how money is being allocated and resources are being allocated.
Because I think previously, you know, we were living in, we're clearly living in a place where flooding is happening all the time. You know, we're right at the edge of the Everglades, which has an amazing backstory. Um, if you haven't read The Swamp, um, which is a book on the history of the Everglades, actually by a friend of mine, Michael Grunewald, talks about the, the constant battle that humans and nature have had down here in Miami.
Um, So I think the importance of making sure that we live harmoniously with the environment down here in Miami is extremely important. So the Nature Conservancy is really doing a lot of that work down here among others, but, but that's one that I'm really involved with.
Gopi Rangan: Atlas, thank you very much for spending time with me and sharing your experiences, giving very nuanced examples of what to look for and how to build a successful startup in the climate and the sustainability space.
I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
Atlas Berry: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. It was good to chat. I look forward to hearing from everyone, uh, you know, creating solutions in the climate tech space.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs.
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