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Comment by elektor | Hacker News Reader

"2% in Climate, Energy, or Sustainability"

I know YC is not a governmental agency and their main goal is profit, but given all that's going on in the world, would've loved to see a substantially higher number here.

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Climate tech doesn't fit the YC model (and tech VC model in general) at all. Projects are too unpredictable and hard to judge. They need many orders of magnitude greater investment to get started than a seed fund can provide. And tech VCs can't really contribute any business expertise in the area.

It's a lot easier to fund a hundred B2B SaaS apps and wait for a handful of them to return 1000x in 5 years.

Well said. I imagine a group like Lower Carbon Capital (https://lowercarboncapital.com/) would be better suited to provide expertise.

The difference is basically a spectrum from pure engineering to pure science. At first, pure science is really volatile, where as pure engineering can be a simple matter of talent and funding. Execution risk is much lower on the engineering side. There are many climate related issues that are bound by engineering.

Not quite accurate, some climate cos getting funded at Seed and preseed by Fifty Years and Lower Carbon. Trick is small number of great teams here, who also see a distinctive advantage to going through YC. YC can’t overcome that without significant effort.

A lot of climate tech is bs unfortunately.

A lot of tech is bs unfortunately. Fixed it for you!

A lot of tech is simple, basically a CRUD app. For instance, there is probably a billion dollar app that will come out in next 10 years that makes performance reviews slightly better (e.g. 15five) or maybe a slightly better chat application (Slack). None of these products relied on technical leaps, just execution and positioning.

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