Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

One of the best-performing venture investors in history is back in the saddle. And this time, he’s bringing the stampede to invest in some of the most consequential companies of our time.

For Chris Sacca, the seeds of investing in energy were sown 23 years ago when he was building data centers for Google.

His investing career went into full bloom with Lowercase Capital, the venture firm he founded in 2010 with $8.4M in capital. Thanks to early investments in Uber, Twitter, Stripe, Instagram, Blue Bottle Coffee, Docker, Optimizely, and others, Lowercase’s first fund returned over 204x DPI and around 250x MOIC.

For his second act, he is going bigger to solve massive problems that require real solutions across energy, power, water, AI, transmission, and nuclear fusion.

He and his wife, Crystal, co-founded Lowercarbon Capital (and are the firm’s largest LPs) to invest in companies that own every part of the electrical stack, from sunlight to socket.

Chris and Crystal have built out a stellar team to match the opportunity in front of them by bringing together the requisite ingredients to be an expert and differentiated investor in energy, advanced manufacturing, nuclear fusion, and transmission. General Partner Clay Dumas was previously Chief of Staff in the White House Office of Digital Strategy. The firm’s most recent General Partner to join the ranks is Caie Kelley, who leads the firm’s Growth investing efforts. Caie brings to bear a background in private equity at Permira and investing in climate startups at Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and output so considerable that the Lowercarbon team calls her “CaieGPT,” despite that output being human-generated.

Irrespective of political regime, geopolitical chokepoints, and supply chain reconfiguration, the world was in dire need of better, faster, safer, cheaper, and cleaner energy alternatives.

Chris, Clay, Caie and team at Lowercarbon set out to invest in new energy and manufacturing companies that could become the foundation of the new energy economy when Lowercarbon launched in 2021. In that time, national security, energy security, geopolitical tensions, reorienting of supply chains, and a hotter earth have all undergone seismic shifts. Lowercarbon has invested across the energy stack to back companies addressing these challenges and building the foundation of the new economy.

There’s a lot to play for here on Earth, as Chris noted in the podcast, saying, “Mars is for quitters. If we are going to Mars, we are giving up on what we have here.”

And what we have here is what this fascinating conversation with Chris and Caie focused on. We covered:

Why climate may not be the best way to describe Lowercarbon’s investing activities.
How big is the energy market?
Why Lowercarbon avoids investing in “science projects.”
What it takes to underwrite investing in hardware and hard tech companies.
How Lowercarbon unearths “fundamentally different technologies that are providing fundamentally different costs,” according to Caie.
Lessons learned from Lowercase and how to know when to bet big on an investment.
Why the likes of Antora, Crux, Fuse Energy, Base Power, Panthalassa, Cloover, Solar Square, Commonwealth Fusion, Emerald AI, and more could be such consequential companies.
Why the Lowercarbon team are “unapologetic capitalists.”

Bios

Caie Kelley, General Partner

Caie is a General Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, where she focuses primarily on growth stage opportunities and provides a quantitative lens to the team’s deep tech and science-backed work. Prior to Lowercarbon, she was at SOUNDWaves, the climate-focused venture arm of Sound Ventures, where she built out the team’s sustainability strategy, helped raise the fund’s first external capital, and backed founders at multiple stages of growth across batteries, alternative materials, circularity, and climate software.

Prior to Sound, Caie was at Permira, an $80b private equity fund based in New York, where she focused on technology and industrial services growth-stage businesses. Caie started her career in the technology investment banking group at JP Morgan in both San Francisco and New York, where she advised IPO-ready companies on how to graduate to the “real world” (public markets).

Caie holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and where she wrote a very, very long thesis on Southeast Asia and first became painfully aware of the disparate effects of climate change on developing parts of the world. Caie grew up in the Bay Area with two biologists as parents but is now a Southern California loyalist — she currently lives in Los Angeles where she spends her free time consuming reality television and staying up to date with pop culture discourse, and going on flat walks in the sun with friends.

Chris Sacca, Founder & Managing Partner

Chris is the co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital, backing the world’s most ambitious and scalable decarbonization solutions across energy, industrial materials, transportation, carbon removal, and advanced manufacturing. The portfolio spans countless companies, each proving to the world that hard-tech climate solutions are just good business.

Alongside his wife, Crystal, Chris also co-founded Lowercase Capital, best known for its very early investments in Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Twilio, Docker, Optimizely, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Stripe, making it one of the most successful venture funds in history.

The performance of the Lowercase funds vaulted Chris to the number-two spot on the Forbes Midas List and landed him a place on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list before he shifted in 2017 from broad-based venture capital to focus on climate innovation, philanthropy, and creative pursuits.

Before becoming an investor, Chris served as Head of Special Initiatives at Google, where he founded and co-led the Access division. His projects included Google’s multi-billion-dollar initiatives for the 700MHz and TV white-spaces spectrum, culminating in Google’s $4.7 billion bid in the FCC spectrum auction. Chris oversaw billions of dollars of global energy projects and co-led the siting and acquisition of groundbreaking data centers in Oregon, Georgia, and the Netherlands. Chris helped expand the company’s global fiber-optic and undersea cable footprint, drove many of Google’s business development and M&A transactions, and was a founding team member of the company’s New Business Development division. In recognition of his accomplishments, Chris was among the first Google employees ever to receive the Google Founders’ Award, the company’s highest internal honor.

Earlier in his career, Chris practiced law at Fenwick & West, representing startups, venture firms, and multinational corporations in financings, M&A, and licensing deals, and later held executive roles, including General Counsel and Head of Corporate Development, at one of the world’s largest streaming and digital media companies, Speedera Networks, later acquired by Akamai.

For almost 20 years, Chris has been a fixture on television, radio, podcasts, in ...

Lowercarbon Capital’s Chris Sacca and Caie Kelley - investing in the powerhouses driving the new energy economy

Alt Goes Mainstream: The Latest on Alternative Investments, WealthTech, & Private Markets

Lowercarbon Capital’s Chris Sacca and Caie Kelley - investing in the powerhouses driving the new energy economy