Retrospectives with
Climate Tech Founders
About Climbing Climate
My motivations for capturing founder post-mortems
As a serial founder and investor in the climate / sustainability space, I often receive requests to share experiences on what has worked and what hasn't. I wanted to make these learnings, and those of other founders, available to more people, and not just in 1:1 networked conversations.
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There's long been an issue in startup land where the same ideas get recycled - they look really attractive, but they're difficult to crack in practice. New cohorts of founders, who may not be aware of prior failed attempts, may take similar approaches and encounter the same roadblocks. This problem seems particularly true in climate tech because many business models take comparatively more money and longer timeframes to scale, in addition to regulatory and incentive alignment challenges.
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I hope the post-mortems on this blog can help entrepreneurs and investors exploring this space be more efficient in designing and testing their hypotheses.
About Catherine Lee
Catherine is the co-founder & COO of Sunrock Distributed Generation, an aggregation platform of smaller-scale solar assets. Sunrock finances, develops and operates distributed energy solutions tailored to the largest, highest-margin segment of the commercial solar market that is currently underserved -- small-medium businesses, non-profits and schools. Sunrock raised $15M in Series A funding in 2022 and has grown to a team of 30+.
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Catherine has 10+ years of product launch, operations and investing experience in the climate / sustainability sector. Prior to Sunrock, she founded Vereday, a startup that helps consumers swap into products that align with their values. She also tested a sustainable seafood quick-service-restaurant that evolved into a B2B shellfish product serving NE supermarkets. Earlier in her career, Catherine was an investor at Silver Lake’s cleantech fund and a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. She earned her MBA at Harvard Business School.
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Catherine attributes her passion for environmental sustainability to her teen years growing up in the beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia - the intersection of gorgeous mountains and ocean, mild climate, and supernaturally friendly people.
