Building resilient climate companies
In this episode of Imagine A World, a podcast by Knight-Hennessy Scholars, Max Du (2024 cohort) and Nikhil Gupta (2022 cohort) speak with Madison Freeman (2022 cohort). She imagines a world where technological solutions drive a sustainable economy.
Madison unpacks her passion for the venture capital climate technology space and what that work looks like day-to-day. She talks about how she became interested in climate issues and where her desire to do internationally impactful work comes from. Madison also shares how students, startups, and international climate initiatives fuel her optimism about solving climate challenges--even amid today's uncertain funding landscape.
Guest
Madison Freeman (2022 cohort), from Austin, Texas, is pursuing a master’s degree in business administration at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a master’s degree in environment and resources at the new Stanford school of sustainability. She graduated from American University with a bachelor's degree in international relations and economics. Madison aims to scale emerging climate solutions, especially those accelerating industrial decarbonization.
Madison served as a senior advisor on technology and innovation to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. She spent several years in venture capital, where she helped to invest in climate and clean energy startups and establish funds focused on backing underrepresented founders and deep decarbonization breakthroughs. Madison founded and directed the NYC chapter of the Clean Energy Leadership Institute, was a 2021 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow with the Atlantic Council, and her clean energy analysis has been published in outlets including NPR, Foreign Affairs, and The Hill.
Imagine A World team
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss (2021 cohort). The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Madison Freeman:
It just always makes me really excited, because I feel like there's never a roadblock we're going to hit that's too big for the collective brain space of people to really innovate, to move around it, to really think of new ways of living and new opportunities to shape our infrastructure, to shape the lives that we lead, and lead them in this way that is sustainable, opportunistic, growth-oriented, but also just really friendly for the environment, the ecosystem we live in, and for people, ultimately, to live happy and good lives.
I'm Madison Freeman, I am also part of the 2022 cohort with Nikhil, and I am also an MBA student and a master's in the Sustainability School in the EIPER program, which we can get into and explain what that giant acronym is on this. I Imagine A World where technological solutions drive a sustainable economy.
Sydney Hunt:
Welcome to the Imagine A World Podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy Scholar community of graduate students, spanning all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, humanities, law, medicine, and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they are doing to bring it to life.
Max Du:
Today, we're going to hear from Madison Freeman, a master's student at the Graduate School of Business with a truly amazing story. From the outskirts of Austin, Texas to the big leagues of policy in DC and venture capital and climate tech. We'll hear it all in this hour, stay with us.
Hi, and welcome to this episode of Imagine A World. I'm Max, your co-host, a 2024 cohort in the Knight-Hennessy program, and a first-year PhD student in computer science. Today, we have a very special guest, and to help us really understand her life story, we brought in her good friend, Nikhil.
Nikhil Gupta:
Hi, I'm Nikhil. I'm a part of the 2022 cohort along with our special guest, Madison today, and I am thrilled to be here. I've been studying Max's work for a while now and I'm a big time fan of our special guest today. I too am an MBA EIPER student. We'll talk about what that means in a minute, but first, let's go over to our featured guest, my close friend, Madison.
Madison Freeman:
Hi, excited to be here. I'm Madison Freeman, I'm part of the 2022 cohort, and I am an MBA and an MS student here at Stanford, finishing up my last year.
Max Du:
Before we talk about the world that you imagine, let's talk about the world that you were born into. Where are you from and what was your journey like to get here?
Madison Freeman:
Sure. I grew up in Austin, Texas, right on the edges of town, and I took a pretty meandering path to get here, I think. I spent a number of years in the East Coast between Texas and California, and it's been nice to be back in the natural environment here that reminds me a lot more of home, with the super dry hills and really scrubby trees of the Palo Alto Stanford area. Between growing up in Texas and moving here a couple of years ago, I lived in DC for a number of years and I lived in New York, went to college in DC, and stayed on the East Coast for a while afterwards working.
Nikhil Gupta:
Amazing. Tell us about that journey and what got you here, because small town Texas, pretty different than San Francisco. What was that path like and what were the key decision points for you?
Madison Freeman:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to talk a little bit more about it. I grew up in Texas, which often could feel pretty far removed from the rest of the world. Really huge state, we were right at the center of it, had a lot of very state-centric culture education, but I had always been really fascinated by the world beyond Texas. I was lucky enough, my grandparents lived in DC when I was growing up, and so I used to go and spend a good chunk of my summers with them every summer. I think, for my parents, it was always really nice to get one of the kids out of the house for the summer, and my grandparents really loved showing me around the city, so I would spend a lot of time in the summers going to really major art museums, going to the Smithsonian, hearing world-class musicians play at different public concerts on the mall, and just seeing the number of people speaking different languages who were working at different embassies.
I think, for me, was this really big... I had a lot of idealism around how wonderful DC was and how wonderful the world is, and I also just really, really loved that sense of connection, of feeling like the world was this place where people were always moving about, where people were sharing big ideas, where people were working on these really big things that made the world better in some way. I think, growing up, I had this vision that I really wanted to go and do something that was very internationally impactful. I had seen and heard of a lot of people working in the state department, a lot of my grandparents' friends had been diplomats or who were working in some big economic either a think tank or an international development organization.
I'd had this vision at the time that I wanted to go to DC to do something really big and broad that would open up the world for me even more, so I had applied for schools and I went to a college in DC at a place called American University up on the northwest side of town, which I believe is not too far from where you grew up, Nikhil.
Nikhil Gupta:
About 15 minutes from where I grew up. Madison-
Max Du:
So close.
Nikhil Gupta:
... and I have been intertwined for a very long time.
Max Du:
Amazing.
Madison Freeman:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious maybe to hear from you too, what growing up in DC was like, because I only got these little snippets over the summer. I wasn't going to school there spending the bulk of the year, but it always felt like a really, really interesting place to be from or have that connection to as a younger person.
Nikhil Gupta:
Yeah. No, I grew up right outside of DC, and I actually think you're capturing it beautifully. In some ways, what's really cool is, I think, as a visitor, you actually got to appreciate it a lot more and do a lot of the really cool offerings that DC brought. I'm going to be honest, as a high school student, the Smithsonian sounded lame, because I hadn't lived anywhere else. We went to every school museum field trip to one of them, but to your point, it really broadened up my horizons and, really quickly, you start to realize how connected we all are to each other and how much of our joint feats are intertwined. I'm curious why you thought to look outside of the US. I mean, Texas is plenty big, there's plenty to work here in the States. Why go abroad?
Madison Freeman:
Wow, that's a good question. I think it was just always really interesting to me. I think the idea of speaking a bunch of different languages, of having connections to different places was always very fascinating. My family has been in the US for a long time, my parents were from California, and that was about as exotic as it got outside of Texas - them growing up there and then moving back - but a lot of people I went to high school with had been, really, from families from all over the world. I went to an international baccalaureate high school, so it was a public high school in Texas, but also had a bit of a magnet program, and a lot of people who came there, their parents had grown up in India or China or Vietnam or Honduras, and then they were coming to the US and picking this school that had a really international focus to send their kids to.
I think, for me, it had been this world where everybody had these connections to places and would go home and visit their extended family in the summers or go to these different diverse places that sounded so interesting. Growing up, we didn't really travel very much. We traveled outside of the US once, so it wasn't like I was doing all of these things and picking them up, but I had this vision for being able to be a diplomat, being able to be somebody whose career involved living in interesting places, learning a new language every few years, picking up a lot of different cultural and historical experiences. I think it just really, really stuck with me, and I had this very clear view when I was going off to college that I really wanted to be a diplomat, working for the state department, posted in one of those hardship posts where it's very, very remote area or really complicated language, and that was the challenge that sounded most interesting to me.
Max Du:
It sounds like that you had this vision from a pretty early age. Even, as you said, before you went into college, you were surrounded by people from other countries, and that was part of your inspiration to do this.
Madison Freeman:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really accurate summary. I think, also, there was a sense of duty. A lot of my friends were looking to do things that felt really impactful and meaningful, and that looks different for everybody. I had a lot of friends who went to medical school and they really wanted to be a doctor or to help people, or people who wanted to go into bioengineering and build things that would be really useful and meaningful for the world. I think I saw doing something that was in the international public service realm, something that would inherently be a really important thing to dedicate your life to, and it would take skill sets that I felt like I was eager to build. These people skills, the language skills, that was all really exciting to me, but it was in service of this idea that you're ultimately serving the world, you're trying to serve your country, you're trying to do something that's at this higher level outside of you. That felt really, really appealing.
Nikhil Gupta:
That's super interesting. I'm curious, you envision this life for yourself in a hardship post in some remote location, and here we are-
Madison Freeman:
Uzbekistan.
Nikhil Gupta:
Right. Here we are, sitting at a conference table in sunny Palo Alto. Talk to me about when your initial interest in climate happened during that formative period and how those things started to weave together.
Madison Freeman:
Yeah. For me, it really happened towards the end of college. I went to American, and American is this very... My friend always jokes that it's a trade school for the civil service. It's very focused on getting your experiences in government or in the jobs you want to have during school. I'd had a number of internships every single semester of college, except for the semesters I was abroad, so I got to go study abroad in Turkey and Scotland, and then I was an au pair for a summer. I was really building up still to wanting to do this very internationally-focused diplomatic career, and a lot of my work had ended up being pretty energy-focused, just because I was focused on sub-state nations. I was looking a lot at, how do you create secure state structures and how do you think about engaging with secessionist politics in a way that builds for a really resilient sustainable country going forward? Rather than one where there's a lot of sub-state tension.
I've been studying these high-minded things about state creation. I've gone to Turkey and Scotland, because I was interested in these two places that I both had strong experiences with sub-state nationalism. Scotland within the UK and the votes that they were having to leave the UK and Turkey with its sub-state Kurdish population. I worked with a Kurdish organization. Basically, the Kurdish embassy in DC, and then had gone there to study how the Turkish government and the Kurds and a lot of the other entities in the region were working in dynamic relation. One of the things I kept finding was that energy was driving a lot of these relationships, and energy was one of the big factors behind Scotland's economic independence. Energy was one of the big things that was driving many of the conversations internally to Turkey, and with Turkey and Russia and all these other entities.
I just gotten really interested in energy as a factor of how the world works, and then, after school, I was working at a couple of think tanks in DC. I worked at the Atlantic Council and then the Council on Foreign Relations, both in energy, environment-focused areas. This was my goal, was to leverage that and to then applying for the foreign service and going down that route, but that was when the 2016 election happened and, with the first Trump administration, there was a big hiring freeze. There was also a lot of tension with people who committed their full careers to the foreign service, and then were now being disrespected or not allowed to represent their country and in a way that was in line with long-term US policy. I think, at that point, it was a really pivotal moment for me, when I was looking at, "Okay, all of a sudden, I can't work for this institution that's existed as long as my country's existed, that I always planned to be able to work for.
What else can I do with my career and what else can I do that feels really impactful and really big if I'm not sitting within the diplomatic arm of a country?" I was just realizing I was learning so much about climate through the energy ecosystem and that learning about how to decarbonize energy systems, how to make them more resilient, how to leverage resources that weren't super geographically concentrated and could lead to a lot of conflict, that that felt like a really meaningful place to be working, and it felt like a really meaningful thing to be doing. I think now there's a lot more... It seems that there's a lot more appetite for climate, there's a lot more focus on climate, even at school level, but it felt to me like something a little bit new that I was still learning a lot about. It felt to me at the time that I was leveraging these experiences I had had with this new and exciting direction to go into where I could also be really impactful, even if it wasn't just through a diplomatic lens.
Max Du:
It sounds like that you got into climate before it was considered cool.
Madison Freeman:
I don't know, I think there's a lot of people who would've considered climate cool in 2016, but certainly, I've been surprised at the number of people that I went to college with who we weren't interested in climate or focused on climate 10 years ago, and now there's a ton of us from American who are doing all sorts of interesting things in climate in a bunch of different capacities. I do feel like the ecosystem has really broadened in the last decade, and what it means to have a climate job is broadened, what climate technology means is broadened, and that's also meant that there's a lot of opportunities to make impact in the climate ecosystem, and make an impact that you feel really good about, that you feel like this is moving the world in the right direction.
Max Du:
That's really interesting. Do you know why there's been an increased interest and why the field has broadened in the past decade?
Madison Freeman:
I think the field that climate in general has broadened in the last 10 years, because number one, the problem is just continuing to get more and more acute. Every year is the hottest year on record, every year is the highest CO2 concentration, we are really dramatically increasing the instability of the world, so I think that a lot of more people every year are experiencing severe wildfires, huge flooding. We look at North Carolina, California, all these different places are having these extreme once-in-1000-years weather events that are now all happening every single year. I think that, on the one hand, people are recognizing the cost and the urgency, and either wanting to work in it or there's also a market and an ecosystem for solutions to alleviate some of that. I also think that it's just something where, the more you see it interconnected into everything else, the more... It's hard to not be working in climate to some degree.
I think that the number of companies that have emerged that are trying to tackle this type of problem, the entire renewable energy industry, lots of these other industries that are focusing on different types of decarbonization, different types of adaptation and resilience have really boomed. So whether you're working in the public sector or the private sector, both managing and responding to climate is a really big ecosystem.
Nikhil Gupta:
I love this. I'm really excited to get into more climate talk, because I think this is why we're all here, at least it's why I'm here, but before we go there, I want to give more people an insight into you, so we're going to go lightning round on some quick questions about you and about climate. First, are you a morning person or a night person?
Madison Freeman:
I would say I'm a morning person, I like the quiet before everybody else is up.
Nikhil Gupta:
There you go, all right. Okay. Hydrogen, carbon capture, or nuclear? Pick one to bet on, if you had to. Only one.
Madison Freeman:
Fission or fusion.
Nikhil Gupta:
You could pick.
Madison Freeman:
Okay. I would say, just for people who are listening who are not huge climate nerds, these are all three areas that have huge hype behind them from certain circles and also huge downsides, and no technology is perfect. I would bet long on nuclear. I have been really interested in the number of companies pouring billions of dollars into nuclear fusion, and I'd be really interested to see which companies come out, because I feel like, at this point, we will have at least one company really cracking the way to do nuclear fusion at scale, which would give us so much energy at a very clean energy, ultimately limitless, so that's one I go long on.
Nikhil Gupta:
Nice, good answer. I'm also a nuclear girly. Best climate conference snack, and you have to be honest.
Madison Freeman:
I feel like people aren't doing enough Earth-themed climate conference snacks, so I'm not going to do one that... Not that I have seen, but I would really love some ants in a log at a climate conference.
Nikhil Gupta:
Fascinating. Okay.
Madison Freeman:
A little celery, peanut butter raisins.
Nikhil Gupta:
Is that what it is? I thought you meant literally for a second.
Madison Freeman:
No, no.
Max Du:
Literal ants.
Madison Freeman:
Ants a log, it's the little kid's snack where you put peanut butter and the celery stick, and then you put little raisins on there.
Nikhil Gupta:
I've never had this, but I'm curious to try-
Max Du:
You never had it in elementary school?
Nikhil Gupta:
Never.
Max Du:
Seriously? Wow.
Madison Freeman:
Wait, did you think I was just suggesting actual we should be eating bugs?
Nikhil Gupta:
Listen, analog. It's a sustainable food source, high in protein. I say we go for it.
Madison Freeman:
I'm all for it.
Nikhil Gupta:
Okay, last couple questions. Dream place that you would love to live for one year. Just one year.
Madison Freeman:
I had a really good time in Portugal a few years ago, you and I were talking about that this weekend at the Knight-Hennessy retreat. I think that I would really love to live in a small town somewhere that has been around for a really long time, and there's a lot of these small coastal towns in Portugal where I'd love to just get to know everyone in a tiny town.
Nikhil Gupta:
I love that. Final question, one climate myth that you wish that you could bust forever?
Madison Freeman:
Wow, there's so many. I think one of the top things that I run into is that there's going to be one solution that solves an entire category of problem. Especially being in the Bay Area ecosystem that's very tech and entrepreneurship-focused, I think that a lot of people focus on, "If I just find the right technology, we'll be able to solve this entire problem," and it's a method of approaching a problem that I think borrows really heavily from the software tech industry of, "There's this new issue in e-commerce that nobody's really seen before, so we're going to tackle it. We're going to solve the entire space and everybody's going to want to use this one solution for that problem." I hear that, sometimes in the climate world of like, "We're going to solve all of geothermal, we're going to solve all of steel, we're going to solve all of cement," all of these different areas that have big opportunities, big challenges.
Just coming at this with a global mindset, the solutions that work in the United States [inaudible 00:19:27] are not always going to work in other geographies for a variety of reasons, whether that's policy or regulatory or just the geology is different or the distribution of people is different. I think really embracing the fact that each of these spaces needs a bunch of different tries to the problem, and some of those tries are going to be startups, entrepreneurship, some of those are going to be different regulatory structures or different policy approaches and incentives. I think just having a really open mindset and a flexible mindset when it comes to how to be solved, the challenges, that's something that I really wish everybody would adopt.
Nikhil Gupta:
Okay, thanks for playing that game with me. Glad that everyone gets a little bit of peek into the friend that I love, besides the climate expert, but let's dig into the world of climate. Can you talk about your first couple of roles and how you broke into the climate space initially when you were transitioning out of this general international worldview?
Madison Freeman:
Yeah. My career between college and Stanford for business school and this master's in the sustainability program, I spent a couple of years in DC in two different think tanks that were very internationally-focused, doing climate and energy policy and technology innovation policy. I spent three years in New York at a venture capital fund where I was focused on really emerging solutions in the climate ecosystem and backing a lot of the most exciting technology companies, and also working with some of the utilities in this space. Then I spent a little less than a year, or about a year, in the Biden administration as a senior advisor to John Kerry, who was our climate envoy. I was his senior advisor on technology and innovation, so tied together a lot of the themes for my career. Then I left that job and came here to Sanford.
I've mostly been working with early-stage climate startups for the last few years as well as a later stage investor. I think, in terms of breaking into climate, for me, my first big career leap was from the think tank realm of DC, which was a pretty natural extension of my undergraduate work in international relations and economics, to going to this very climate-specific investment fund that was looking at all things clean energy and climate that was backed by utility partners, so the funding and the partner engagement was with these big incumbents in the energy and climate space. Then we were backing and looking to invest in climate solutions from a very early stage that were really long shot, big goals to very large companies that were tackling utility-centered problems with less technology risk. That was a huge pivot, to go from an institution that was not focused that much on climate.
Basically, me and my boss were the only people at the time who were really focused on climate at the think tank I was at, to being at a firm where that's all that anybody lived and breathed. Not only did everybody live and breathe climate, but everybody lived and breathed a very specific type of climate tech, these earlier-stage companies and startups that were emerging in the ecosystem, and trying to figure out how to fit those in to the existing infrastructure and really solve a lot of challenges across climate and energy. I think, for me, a lot of moving into climate as a full-time job was really getting up to speed on climate technologies, and so I started to do that in these think tanks. I was working a lot on, "What is happening across the country, across the world? What are the most innovative new solutions that are out there?"
Climate technology can mean a ton of different things, and people apply it really broadly, too. It can mean everything from, "How do we produce low carbon electricity?" That could be geothermal, that can be nuclear, that can be wave power, that can be all sorts of different things. It can include producing industrial technologies or industrial products in a low carbon way that can be cement, steel, it could be producing power for industrial processes, so everything from food and beverage to these high-temperature manufacturing processes. How do we produce power, heat, steam, whatever's needed without using fossil fuels? It can also mean a range of adaptation technologies. Our climate's changing, how do we prevent wildfires from being quite as bad? How do we make our shorelines more resilient? How do we grow climate-resistant crops, especially in countries in the global south where the climate is changing so rapidly year over year?
How do you prevent drought from totally wiping out a ton of people's livelihoods? It's a super, super huge bucket, and I think, for me, a lot of that transition was recognizing what things that I felt like I could bring to the conversation in the place that I was at the time, and also thinking about what problem within climate I wanted to be tackling, because tackling all of climate change is this incredibly large ocean. If you focus in on, "I think what I really want to tackle is preventing wildfires," or, "I really want to tackle policies that enable cities to be able to really respond to a changing climate," or any of those particular areas, can it be something really manageable where you can figure out what your role is in that? For me, what was really exciting, outside of climate, was new technology solutions.
Then what I wanted to feel like I was doing is helping to move those along, so they would have a big global impact, so I could feel like I was doing something that was important for the world. Growing up, I'd also read a lot of Wired Magazine and Popular Science, and all these science magazines, and just thought that technology innovations coming out of universities were really, really interesting. Seeing how people tackled a new engineering solution was really fascinating, so I'd really focused on what were some of the new solutions for big climate problems and what did it mean for them to go from a lab to actually something that was making a meaningful impact?
That's the work that I was doing when I was at this think tank, and during that time, I'd had a little bit of a career search where, all of a sudden, I realized, "I'm not going to go into the foreign service right now, I'm not sure if I ever will, and I really want to do something that's really impactful, but I think I want to do it outside of the DC policy ecosystem." I had started to think around about, "Who is making a really big impact on these early stage technologies that are in these labs, these really early startups? What gets them to scale and impact, and what makes some of them succeed and others not?" That's when I had started talking to a lot of folks who were working in venture capital, accelerators, incubators, these institutions that help startups scale and really come in at that exact point.
I think my move into climate from a tactical career perspective was that I was bringing a policy lens and bringing a knowledge of a lot of these regulatory impacts on startups from my previous job and bringing that to offer to my next job, but then I think at a big level it was really identifying, "Where are my skill sets? What do I like doing? What am I particularly good at?" And then, "Which problem do I want to tackle?" Marrying that, "What am I very good at and what do I want to be solving for?" Or, "What do I want to be solving?" Was how I found my way into the venture capital climate tech ecosystem.
Nikhil Gupta:
It's still quite a broad ecosystem. You talked yourself about just how many different problems there are to solve in climate and how many technologies you have to get familiar with in order to really start to make a difference, so how did you start to narrow down your own focus?
Madison Freeman:
Well, I think one of the beautiful things about venture capital is you don't really have to narrow down. The fund I was at, when I joined, was really focused on utility-connected solutions, so I was looking a lot more at things in the clean energy realm, and it wasn't always 100% decarbonization. Sometimes the challenge was, "How do we integrate electric vehicles into the grid in a way that is really good for balancing?" That has trickle down effects then, obviously, about... You can then bring a lot more electric vehicles to market, but there were things that were a little bit more near term, about how do we integrate these things in? Then once we started raising for this fund that was supposed to go away into Frontier Technologies, all of a sudden, my remit was everything from cement to carbon capture to heavy transportation to hydrogen. All of these different areas, starting to think through, "What is the investment thesis? What does the scope look like? What companies are out there?"
I don't think I ever down selected at the time, it was very focused on, "How structurally do you scale up these emerging solutions and companies?" I guess if I was to say that I had any focus, it was things that were connected to electricity in some way. I was generally more focused on electrification solutions, but it wasn't until probably I came to Stanford that I really started focusing in on very specific technologies, because even in my role when I was in the administration at the State Department, I was still expected to cover everything that had to do with new and emerging technologies. I would've probably said at the time that my primary focus was industrial solutions and technologies in those areas. I was still covering a ton of different things.
Max Du:
Just to back up a little bit, because I'm sure that a lot of listeners are curious, what is the day-to-day like in a VC firm that you worked at? What's that like?
Nikhil Gupta:
Even more foundationally, what is a VC firm?
Max Du:
Yeah.
Madison Freeman:
Well, venture capital. Fundamentally, a venture capital firm is looking to make investments and they would, say, take bets on early-stage companies, and by giving money upfront to the company, they are then taking a portion of ownership of that company. It generally tends to be a little smaller, it's not ownership of the company or full control. Tends to be a smaller portion of the company as the company grows. The idea is that you are backing ideas that are really wild, really interesting, that have a lot of potential, and that want to move fast. That has been a sector that's really emerged here in the Bay Area. The venture capital firms really were emerging a lot more in the '50s, but they became much more prominent in the '90s and 2000s with a lot of the tech boom.
Applied to climate, it's a really interesting, I think, challenge, because venture capital in the Bay Area had been really focused around, "Okay, we're doing these software businesses," where yes, you might need to pay a lot of engineers, I'm sure a lot of companies you're familiar with from the computer science standpoint, but you don't have to invest a lot into the manufacturing or the hardware. The end result is you have a company where you can put a lot of money in and they can flex around and they can pivot a bunch of times, and it's very, very different to be investing at this venture capital. We're taking high risks on the opportunity that some of these companies will turn out to be really incredible world-changing companies. When you're doing that in the climate realm, where there's a lot of hardware involved and there's a lot of generally needing to focus in on a particular area and really, really go deep on building trust with infrastructure players, with all these other people involved in climate in the grid or the heavy industry sector that you're looking at, it's a different model in some regards.
I think that a lot of the folks who are more successful in the space tend to have a longer time horizon for their investments, tend to be a little more thoughtful about what they can bring to the companies that they work with from either their investors or from other strategic partners that they have. Fundamentally, at this venture capital firm, we were investing in early-stage companies and then helping them grow and then hoping that they would become really big successful companies that would then make a return on investment for the investors, but also that they would have a really big and outsized impact on climate.
Max Du:
One thing I am still curious about is... You talked a lot on the technical aspects of working at the VC, because I'm also curious, personally, I hear so much about, "VC this, VC that," in the corporate world, in software deep tech, what is your day-to-day? You don't have to necessarily talk about your particular fund, but what do you envision as a role of someone like you in a VC fund? What is that like on the day-to-day?
Madison Freeman:
Yeah. I think what I really loved about venture capital and what informed a lot of the ways that I've approached learning here at Stanford down the line is that your job is really just to be able to learn fast and ask good questions, and I think that those are the two main things. Really, the questions part that's the driving force behind a lot of it is, how do you ask the right questions and then how do you absorb that information and identify where you need to know more? A lot of my day-to-day working in a venture capital fund was a mix of deals we already had ongoing, so continuing to dig into a new company that we were looking at potentially investing in, making sure we had asked all the questions that we would need to ask to get to know the company and understand whether it was going to be a really good investment, a good bet, something that might make a huge impact, and also grow really fast.
It would be a mix of really digging deep into a particular company, also looking at a new sector that we might be looking to invest in, so digging really far into the steel ecosystem and trying to understand what startups are tackling this and how, and who would they sell to and what things are being done already in incumbents, and how is policy and regulation shaping this environment? What is the investment needed? Where are the winds blowing? Then a lot of it was also just meeting people. I think I've always really loved engaging with people directly, and it was a lot of just getting to know folks, getting to understand what drove them, what motivated them to build a company if they were a founder, what motivated them to buy from companies if they were a partner in an incumbent organization, and just being able to tease all of that out.
The day-to-day was really different constantly, and that, to me, was very exciting to have this breadth of things going on and then just constantly be trying to reframe in my head, "What do I not know here and what do I need to ask to figure out the answer?"
Nikhil Gupta:
Did you have any go-to questions that you can let the listeners in on?
Madison Freeman:
I think, when talking to companies, especially ones where we had already developed some of a relationship, I was always really interested in what scared them. If you're building something, what are you most afraid of happening here? Is it something external? Is it something that you don't know internally? What's the worst case scenario and why? Because I think, when you talk to people about what's really, really exciting for them, there's a lot of really amazing things that they can lay out for you. When you ask them what they're afraid of, you can start to piece out really clearly, "What drives this person? Are they really afraid that they're going to lose really incredible talent on their team and they're really motivated to create a culture and values, and their team and organization that's going to drive it to be really sustainable? Are they really afraid that an incumbent is going to come in and sweep and take the market share away from them?" Just understanding how people tick and then how that might drive them to make decisions was always an interesting thing to me about meeting a new company.
Nikhil Gupta:
I love that. I would love to talk about, straight out of undergrad, you really started to dig into this breadth of technologies, but it really was outside of the government framework that you had first focused so much on. You had a full-circle moment and you came back to the State Department. Can you talk about what that transition was like, how you ended up in a political role in the administration, and what you got to do there?
Madison Freeman:
Sure. I had left DC to go to this venture capital firm and, about a year in, the campaign was really winding up into full gear in 2020. I've been reached out to by some folks in the campaign to serve in an advisory capacity, I think just to provide some context onto climate questions and be on call in case there was a major news event or something that the democratic candidate would need to respond to. So I gotten engaged with some folks in the campaign and then, about I'd say a year after that, when the inauguration happened for Biden, I had been reached out to by a few people to join the administration. I think, for me, the path that led me there, to being asked to come on board to be an advisor to our climate lead and climate envoy was really a journey of relationships.
I had been in DC, I had built a lot of relationships with a lot of people. Actually, one of the people I worked with in Kerry's office, who is still somebody I really, really trust as a collaborator, was my supervisor when I was an intern my sophomore year in college.
Nikhil Gupta:
Wow, you'd never know when those relationships are going to come back around.
Madison Freeman:
Yeah. He was only probably at that point five or six... I'm not sure, a few years older than I was, but he was somebody who had been really kind and really introduced me to the world of climate, and then it was really a full-circle moment where, when a number of people who had been, say, friendly colleagues in the DC ecosystem had joined the Biden administration... I assume, when they were thinking about people that they knew who were knowledgeable about climate and knew technology specifically, I'd been someone on the radar. Then, I'd say, most specifically, I have a dear mentor of mine for a long time. His name is Faroon. He had been a boss of mine at the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the think tanks I worked at, and it just always been somebody I really looked up to and admired and aspired to follow his career journey.
He had joined John Kerry's team leading a lot of the climate and energy. The energy-related aspects of that portfolio. He was one who really directly advocated to bring me on board, and I think, to me, that is... If you're thinking about career journeys, one of the big lessons is you just really... When you find people who are really wonderful and amazing mentors, they will continue to be an incredible guide for you, whether that's directly like Faroon did and bringing you into an interesting and new job and environment, really advocating for you, or even just for serving as somebody who you can aspire to follow and setting that standard for, "How do I shape a career that feels impactful? How do I make moves in my life that feel like they have really big meaning?" I guess, to summarize, the way that I made that transition was really a bit of luck, of just people I'd known who really trusted me, and also just building those relationships over time.
The transition itself, job-wise, I was surprised at... I thought it was going to be this huge, really, really difficult leap, to go from being at a venture capital fund of... At the time, I think we were like 50 people, to working for the US State Department, and the very multi-layered web of government in DC and the political administration, but I was surprised. We were in this office that was brand new and is the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate office. It bridged the State Department and the White House. Kerry was on the NSC, so we were engaged in-
Nikhil Gupta:
National Security Council, for those of us who are new to the government lingo.
Madison Freeman:
Yeah, so we were really engaged in the White House as well, too. Because it was a brand new office, we got to be almost a startup inside government, and that meant that we really just had a lot of flexibility to tie into really interesting initiatives to bring new things to the table and to connect with new people. There was no real rule book when I joined in a certain way, just in that, if you had a really great idea and potential opportunity for the United States to be engaged in some way, people were open to hear about it. My goal of being there was to really bring American innovation in climate to a lot of the conversations we were having globally, because I think that, sometimes, I've seen that conversations in climate can be really stuck in, "Here is the technologies we had at a certain point in time," and it can be pretty static.
People can say things that are no longer true about the price of renewables being really high or that there aren't solutions for, you name it, steel decarbonization or something else. That's kind of tricky, but now we have really promising solutions. It felt really important to me that, if we were going to be going around the world saying, "We need to decarbonize, we have to address this climate problem that... by the way, the US and other wealthy countries had primarily driven the actual historical emissions," we also had to be offering solutions. I feel like I see so many incredible companies in the United States, and there are incredible companies globally, but the concentration, and there's been a bunch of analysis of this, it's not just me saying it, but there's a concentration of really impactful climate technologies coming out of the US ecosystem, has been huge.
I think the more that we can leverage that and provide that as a global good and global opportunity, it's a strength of the United States and it's something that we should really be putting at the forefront of what we can offer and the impact that we can have. I think the more that I could weave those together, the more impactful I felt in that role.
Nikhil Gupta:
That makes total sense. I think for a lot of people, that's a dream job, being a senior advisor, especially for a policy wonk, to the White House and the State Department. I'm curious, you... I think you're underplaying your own role and skill in building this really wonderful network, but I'd be curious, for someone who's maybe listening and hasn't built out that role of expert, doesn't live in Washington DC, but is looking to break into the policy space, where would you suggest they start?
Madison Freeman:
I feel like, if you want to work in policy, having an area that you focus on really allows you to become an expert and become somebody who's really meaningful in the conversation, I think more quickly than most people realize. There's a lot of parts of policy that are very niche or are moving quickly, where I've seen people who are even undergraduates, but also grad students, and people who are pretty early in their careers, carve out a huge area where they are somebody who's really trusted as an expert on this particular space. I think one of the things that, honestly, being in the DC think tank ecosystem where everybody has a strong opinion and everybody's building a bit of a brand, if I learned anything from that, it was that you can really become an expert on something and that you can inform the conversation, and that looks different for every person.
I think that, if you want to make an impact on policy or if you want to create connections in policy, my follow-up question would be like, "Well, what type of policy?" If you're really interested in housing policy in the United States, there's a ton of areas of housing policy that are relatively understudied or that could really use a new perspective on it, and so if you really want to contribute to that conversation, I think there's a lot of ways to build up your own knowledge and engage in the ecosystem once you get a little more granular about, how do you think about the change you want to make, where the pain points are in the country, and where is there not really somebody who's focused on moving that needle forward or enough of a conversation happening around that?
Nikhil Gupta:
It's interesting, because I feel like that's actually frequently the same advice that people will get when you're trying to break into venture capital or certain parts of the private sector, so it sounds like expertise, relationships, like getting granular is something that'll serve you well wherever you go.
Madison Freeman:
Yeah. I think especially a lot of these sectors, there's not as much of a divide between the public and the private. I mean, you are also somebody who has had a career that's bridged public and private sectors, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but I would just say, moving between... I moved between nonprofits for the first few years of my career to venture capital firm, which was very much a for-profit enterprise, to fully government, and then now for the last few years, I've been working with startups with other investors. The people I interact with, it's so similar, and it's because the climate space, a lot of people move between public and private, because they see different ways to make impact and they choose different roles where their skill set in electricity market design can really help move the conversation in an academic setting to setting government policy to being at a utility or at a solar developer.
I think that understanding how so many careers weave back and forth also gives you this lens to be like, "Well, it's all ultimately about trust, relationships, people," and just being able to be really curious all the time. I think that question-asking for me has been something that's continued to open the doors of like, "Well, why isn't anybody focused on this? Who does know about this? How can I talk to them?" I think the question asking from venture capital bleeds into all the other spaces, nonprofit and public alike.
Nikhil Gupta:
That makes total sense, and I feel like... Yeah, I mean, I feel the exact same way. I, as you know, have transitioned between government and nonprofits. I worked at a hedge fund, I was all over the place, and a lot of it is this recognition that a lot of that knowledge... Both the knowledge and your curiosity is very transferable across sectors, regardless of that specific mission. You can always find a way to contribute if you're really focused on the same subject areas and exploring the same deep questions and insights. It's super, super cool to hear that journey come to life. Thanks for sharing.
Max Du:
As we approach the end of the hour here, and very similar to what you're talking about in terms of advice for people trying to get into public policy sector, trying to get into VCs, do you have any advice for people trying to apply to Stanford and Knight-Hennessy?
Madison Freeman:
That's a tough one. I feel like it's always hard to give broad advice, because everybody's situation is so different. I think some of the things that were really helpful for me... I came here to Stanford, and we didn't get a chance to talk too much about the experience here, but I came here to Stanford to get an MBA and a master's in the Sustainability School. This interdisciplinary program that Nikhil and I are both in, that is this interdisciplinary program focused on environment resources, it really allows you to choose your own adventure across all of the Stanford schools. You are supposed to take a bunch of technical coursework focused on sustainability, but you can down select into these different areas, so you can focus on climate effects on human health and aging. You could focus, like I have, on technology scale up and financial and legal opportunities and challenges as companies grow, and on a lot of the climate technology solutions themselves.
You can take all these different paths. I think, when I was coming to Stanford, some of the best advice I got was to really drill down on why I was coming. Stanford, the business school, has a question called, "What matters most to you, and why?" That's their main question in the application, and for me, I had a friend tell me, "Ask yourself that question and then keep asking why. Ask five times. Once you answer the what matters most to you and why, ask yourself why that why? Why that why?" That really getting to the heart of what you wanted to accomplish and the change you want to make in the world will drive forward what degree you focus on, which school you want to go to, and how you approach that whole application process. Then, in my opinion, beyond just the application process, which a lot of... I think the bigger point of advice is to continue asking yourself that why and letting it guide you through whatever program you choose.
For me, coming here, the why was that I really wanted to make this more stable and resilient world happen, and that I saw the path to doing so by enabling a lot of emerging solutions to get to scale and really driving forward meaningful change in infrastructure. Having that as my north star and then also having this other element of... I wanted to use Stanford to try out a few different pathways to making that impact, and I wanted to use my time here to really color a lot of the approaches I was thinking about in climate tech and be able to more deeply inform my knowledge and my ability to drive those solutions forward. I think having a real clear vision of what you want to do and why you want to do it and how you want to do it and how Stanford and how your program is going to guide you there will also just help you be more effective when you get here and have an experience that tees you up to have a really big impact in the world.
Max Du:
Absolutely. Knowing what you want, exactly. Another question is, you've been in the Knight-Hennessy community for what? Two years?
Madison Freeman:
Two and a half, yeah.
Max Du:
Two and a half, wow. Yeah, half a year has gone. As you're looking back at it, is there anything from the Knight-Hennessy community, the events or anything, that has helped or supported you in your personal and professional life?
Madison Freeman:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think both Knight-Hennessy and the interdisciplinary masters I've taken have really opened my eyes up to a lot of academic work in other disciplines, have really appreciated a lot of the community that Knight-Hennessy has. Not only getting to have Nikhil around all the time, but also-
Nikhil Gupta:
All the time.
Madison Freeman:
So many of my friends who are in vastly different programs than myself, people who are doing PhDs focused on the history of food and agricultural systems, to people who are doing all sorts of interesting medical work on very specific diseases. The type of people that you have on the program, I feel like I have people I get to have really interesting conversations with every day. We just came back from this weekend retreat, Nikhil and I, with a bunch of folks from across different cohorts that Hennessy runs up in Lake Tahoe, and a lot of those conversations really stuck with me, because of how broad they were and how many really, really fascinating and meaningful interactions we were able to have of just talking about election security, cyber security of voting machines, talking about how people were thinking about raising children, thinking about what it means to have a life that's balanced with being in the outdoors and also being really driven in a career.
Then also things that were just really niche about learning about somebody's interest in particular books or being able to have a really deep conversation with somebody about what their thesis is going to be focused on and what their dissertation is going to do for the field that they work in. I've just really treasured a lot of that, and I think it's really helped expand my capacity to be curious.
Nikhil Gupta:
A couple of forward-looking questions, because we're in a really interesting time for climate. I'm curious, up until now, there's been a trend in increasing investment and increasing activity in climate. There's a little bit of a change to that trend recently, or at least that's what it seems like from my perspective. I'm curious, in this environment in the last couple of years where it feels like maybe climate... Is it on the fritz? Are we moving away from it, or do you think that we're still charging full steam ahead, and if not, how do we navigate through this moment?
Madison Freeman:
Yeah, it is a weird time for climate right now. We are going from a number of years of a really big boom in investment to what is looking to be a pretty antagonistic couple of years and a much harder environment, so I would say, on a holistic level, there was a huge boom in investment from the private sector into climate. Starting, really, in 2020, we saw a ton of investment from venture capital firms, a lot of adoption of very ambitious climate goals. This was something that I was working on, trying to implement into more fixed goals, policies, mandates, all these sorts of things when I was in government in '22, and there was still a lot of private sector activity then. In the lead up to the 2024 election, and so much of this is fundamentally political, there was more, I'd say, reduction in ambitious goal setting by the private sector.
We've also seen a more uncertain venture capital environment, so there's been a lot lower spend the last few years, or a lot lower growth in spending in investing in backing companies over the last few years. Now we're going from an environment where, under the Biden administration, we were investing a ton of capital into climate tech projects, because we saw it as a way to build back industry, manufacturing, build a country where we had really long-lasting supportive, sustainable communities in way more ways than one. It wasn't just about decarbonizing communities, but it was building back better, was the whole ethos. I really feel like a lot of the money that flowed into these climate tech projects was targeted at regions where there was lower employment, there was a lot of economic struggle, and we were building climate in order to build a stronger country.
A lot of that money is now on the fritz, and from a federal perspective, and we're seeing a lot not only tightening, but clawbacks of money that was allocated and obligated for climate projects, and it's a pretty uncertain funding environment from a private perspective, when you think about venture capital firms and other customers. I think, for me, when I look at all of that and I say, "Okay, this seems like we're in a bear year for a climate," one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is we actually have already had a climate boom and bust. It's not particularly the right way to say it, because we still have a ton of great climate companies, but we had a ton of investment in climate tech up until about 2010. It was 2008, 2009, where these big boom years in investing.
Mix of government funding post great recession and private sector interest in space, and then we had a couple of years of total drought, where we saw a lot of the companies that investors had backed didn't go the ways that they were expecting for a variety of reasons, many of which is more geopolitical, with China investing a lot into its own domestic solar and battery ecosystem, and undercutting a lot of the innovation happening here in the US, but we also saw a lot of nervousness or uncertainty about climate in general and climate technology solutions. When I think back to that, I feel like there's a pattern here, and it's a reminder for me that many of the best climate companies, the best climate solutions, the best climate policies came out of these years where it wasn't so robust, where we didn't have as much attention and backing in every direction.
I think, ultimately, to answer your question, I feel like it is a harder time for climate solutions right now, which it shouldn't be, they're needed more than ever, but it doesn't mean that climate solutions aren't happening or they aren't growing, or they aren't growing globally. One of the things I was most proud of doing over the last few years was that I got to teach a class for the State Department after I left. I would teach a class every quarter, often around the world. The last one I taught was in Thailand to foreign service officers, US diplomats who are based all around Asia, and every one of these that I did, people would bring up all these really incredible climate technologies and climate companies and climate initiatives in the countries that they were posted to. Everywhere around the world, whether that was Uganda or Indonesia or Bangladesh and Nepal, or all these different places that people were in, where they were really liaising with, "What is climate technology? What does climate solutions look like on the ground?"
That, to me, brought me a lot more faith in the ecosystem. It's not just what is happening here in the US, what's happening in the Bay Area, in the Silicon Valley bubble of venture capital and startups, but we're making a lot of progress globally. We do need to move fast, we need to move way faster, but I think focusing on where we're getting a lot of this speed and innovation and really trying to galvanize that is something that is really important to me.
Nikhil Gupta:
My last question is, what's one piece of climate progress that genuinely gives you hope right now?
Madison Freeman:
I think one of the things that has really given me hope, and especially being here at Stanford, is the number of people, especially the undergraduate community here, who are so passionate about solving climate challenges and see it as core to their lives, core to their future, core to everything they want to do, and they're approaching in so many different ways. I've gotten to be part of this amazing class here at Stanford called Stanford Climate Ventures.
It's basically startup zero-to-one program here, where you get to incubate ideas and try to spin out a company, and the number of students in that who are much younger than I am, who are maybe 10, 12 years younger, who are doing these things for the very first time and are just bringing so much optimism, hope, and just new ways of thinking about things, it just always makes me really excited, because I feel like there's never a roadblock we're going to hit that's too big for the collective brain space of people to really innovate, to move around it, to really think of new ways of living and new opportunities to shape our infrastructure, to shape the lives that we lead, and need them in this way that is sustainable, opportunistic, growth-oriented, but also just really friendly for the environment, the ecosystem we live in, and for people, ultimately, to live happy and good lives.
Nikhil Gupta:
Thank you. All of a sudden, I'm so much more optimistic and excited about where we're headed. Max, over to you.
Max Du:
Me too. This is about the time we have, but this has been such an amazing hour with you, Madison, and thank you so much for co-hosting with me, Nikhil. Thank you for agreeing to come on last minute and bringing all of your amazing energy. I can just see this friendship between you that goes way back, even maybe before you knew it, when you were both up in DC, trying to live your own lives, and seeing you coming out of Austin, Texas and making it big in all these different places. It's just been so inspiring, and I'm sure that everyone who is listening will feel the same energy, so thank you so much for taking your time, both of you, this afternoon to tell your stories.
Nikhil Gupta:
Well, I'm sitting next to two of my heroes, so it's been a lovely hour for me. Thanks for having me on.
Madison Freeman:
Thank you so much, Max. This has been the experience and friendship that I've really treasured getting to have here, and now I'm getting all misty-eyed about ending my time at Stanford.
Max Du:
Onward, onward. Yay, thank you so much.
Sydney Hunt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine the World, where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program, providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford, while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media, @knighthennessy, and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
