Why aren't energy startups funded like software? (with Doug Rand)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Hey, Limited Partners. Before we dive into this episode with Doug Rand, which for the record is one of my favorites to date, I wanted to remind everyone about our global virtual meetup. Next week, we will all be getting together on the internet to celebrate Acquired passing the million download milestone. It'll be February 21st at 5:30 PM Pacific, which is 8:30 PM Eastern time. We'll be using Zoom and structuring it as a live Q&A with folks. We haven't done one of these before, but in the spirit of experimenting with the edges of the podcasting medium, we're going to give it a shot. If you want to join, mark your calendar now, and you can check out the Slack or the website beforehand with the link. Now, onto this fascinating and important discussion on clean energy funding and the whole capital supply chain with Doug Rand.

Hello, Acquired Limited Partners, and welcome to the bonus show.

David and I are here with a very special guest for you today, Doug Rand. So hello, Doug.

Doug Rand (1:01)

Hello.

Ben Gilbert (1:03)

Thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Doug Rand (1:05)

Thank you for having me.

Ben Gilbert (1:07)

So listeners, I know Doug because he is the co-founder of Boundless, which is a Pioneer Square Labs spin-out company that is making it humane and sane to immigrate to the United States with absolute trust and confidence and really modern tools. And-

Doug Rand (1:27)

That was a really good elevator pitch. I might have to steal that.

Ben Gilbert (1:31)

I think you guys have A-B tested sort of the perfect way to describe it on your website, but I couldn't quite remember it.

Doug Rand (1:37)

Humane and sane, that's a good tagline.

Ben Gilbert (1:41)

Yeah, well, it's better on audio because it rhymes.

Doug Rand (1:44)

Yeah.

Ben Gilbert (1:45)

But today, listeners, we're going to dive into a topic that Doug knows really well, and that's the state of energy funding in the United States, and particularly given sort of the global energy crisis that we're in and specifically around carbon emissions. Doug has a ton of really cool, nuanced thoughts and basically history in sort of different startups that have tried to innovate in energy and how funding flows to them over the years. And we had this great coffee a couple months ago, and I thought, gosh, this is something that really needs to be shared more broadly and that our LPs would really dig.

And so, Doug, to kick it over to you, I know that you worked in the Obama administration. You've appeared sort of all over national news, news in different TV platforms, talking about both immigration and some of the entrepreneurship stuff you worked on in the White House. Can you give us a little bit of sense of sort of your background and what got you into the space?

Doug Rand (2:55)

Sure. Yeah, I'm happy to. Well, I mean, briefly, I guess I'm just your typical evolutionary biologist turned theater publisher, turned policy wonk, turned tech entrepreneur. Yeah, with the full story. But I mean, basically, I was very fortunate and came to the White House on a public policy fellowship in 2010 And I was in this wonderful part of the White House called the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which under the Obama administration really expanded and had a whole range of really exciting activities going on. And I was given pretty much a new portfolio because I'd been an entrepreneur before.

And we're still digging our way out of the recession.

Everyone in the country and particularly policymakers are thinking about job creation. And at the time, it was still some fairly new research that showed that startups, not just in tech, but across the board and not just in Silicon Valley, but across the country. But the new companies really have a special role to play in job creation and innovation, more than incumbents. And that traditionally, small business policy was always a central concern of any president, but that's probably different from policies to promote high growth potential startups. So what would those policies look like? And so that was a really exciting mission to pursue.

Here's a new policy portfolio, go figure it out.

Ben Gilbert (4:35)

Right, and that led to things like the International Entrepreneur Rule? Yeah, all kinds of things.

Doug Rand (4:39)

So, I mean, yeah, so like most of the things I worked on were technology neutral and industry neutral. Let's just sustain and grow America's lead as the best place on earth to start and scale a company.

And so I did things around access to capital, most prominently, something called the Jobs Act, which has made it possible to do crowd funding for debt and equity and also has made IPOs a little bit less costly.