"Whether by design or by default, we are going to move into the future with an amount of innovation that overwhelms incumbency."
Episode Sponsor
Andy Karsner is a leading corporate innovation strategist and accomplished energy entrepreneur, policymaker, regulator and diplomat. Andy began his career developing large-scale energy infrastructure and has led or contributed to project development, management and finance on six continents. From 2005 to 2008, he served as US Assistant Secretary of Energy, responsible for multi-billion dollar federal R&D programs and National Laboratories. As a private equity investor, venture partner and advisor, his portfolios have included some of the most successful climate tech startups of the past decade, including Nest and Tesla. Andy is a Senior Strategist at X (formerly Google X), former Managing Partner at Emerson Collective, and Co-Founder of Elemental Excelerator. He holds a BA with honors from Rice University and an MA from Hong Kong University.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
| I'm Emily Kirsch, founder, and CEO of Powerhouse. This is what it takes a show about the entrepreneurs making our zero carbon future a reality. | |
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| So it wasn't was it green It wasn't uh is it saving emissions in 1998 It wasn't really thinking about that that much That was a learning journey And so I bought into the notion That we could supersize the wind industry And that got me excited of taking a new technology and looking at it as a first mover | |
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| I'm Emily Kirsch, founder, and CEO of powerhouse. This is what it takes a show about the entrepreneurs making our zero carbon future. A reality. The clean energy industry is now an extremely powerful force. Each year. More investment goes into wind solar and hydro than into fossil fuels. And in the next five years, renewables are forecast to make up 95% of new power plant capacity around the world. But not that long ago, even the smartest people in energy dismissed, renewables as trivial | |
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| I was not passionate about renewable energy When I crossed the transom into renewable energy which was 1998 In fact I was quite skeptical. | |
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| This is Andy Karsner. It may not sound like it, but in the mid two thousands, he oversaw billions of dollars in government, clean energy spending during a breakout moment for the industry, you may have heard of him in the news. Recently, he was just voted onto Exxon mobile's board by activist shareholders as a way to hold the oil giant accountable on climate change. In 2005, Andy was chosen by president George W. Bush to lead the department of energy's office of energy efficiency and renewable energy. That meant directing R and D and deployment efforts across wind solar, fuel cells, biofuels and other up and coming technologies. But back in the nineties, Andy was building lots of gas and diesel power plants. He didn't think much of wind and solar few developers did. | |
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| And there was a good reason to be skeptical because almost nothing was commercial and anything that was commercial was deeply subsidized and completely a hundred percent reliant on the government And any of that was of such small and insignificant scale that a conventional power developer would look at that and go really You want me to do this small stuff when I'm used to doing this big stuff | |
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| But then he got an offer. He couldn't refuse a chance to lead a company called enter Corp. That was riding the early growth of Europe's wind market. Andy wasn't motivated by the environmental cause for wind rather, he loved the idea of scaling a nascent industry, especially making it as big as thermal power plants that dominated the electric grid. And so he moved to London to give it a shot. | |
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| So it wasn't was it green It wasn't uh is it saving emissions in 1998 It wasn't really thinking about that that much That was a learning journey And so I bought into the notion That we could supersize the wind industry And that got me excited of taking a new technology and looking at it as a first mover | |
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| that detour define the rest of Andy's career. It quickly became clear that wind had the potential to scale. Every project got bigger development, improved radically, and in the early two thousands wind was looking a lot like traditional thermal power generation. | |
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| When I went into the attributes of the things that I was building and as I was supersizing them I was going Holy shit Smoke This is a lot of non-polluting energy. [MUSIC POST TO EMPHASIZE] | |
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| Over the last two decades, Andy Karsner has become a highly influential, clean energy entrepreneur, investor, and strategist. He oversaw billions of dollars in wind projects, and then billions, more in government investment to kickstart the U S wind and solar boom later, he invested in companies like Tesla, nest and recurrent. Today. He's the senior strategist at ax. The innovation lab run by Google's parent company alphabet. He also, co-founded a non-profit investment group now called elemental accelerator that has invested $43 million into climate tech startup. I sat down with Andy at the 2021 MIT energy conference earlier this year, just after the big Texas blackouts, we talked about his early days in renewables, the massive tech and market changes. He oversaw in government and the new challenges for entrepreneurs in today's maturing industry. We started with his multicultural background, which guided his career, traveling the world, building power plants. [MUSIC END] PART I: Childhood / Early Influences: Multicultural travelling childhood, religious studies at rice U, experience in Pakistan in the mid 90s. your family home was multi-lingual multicultural Your mom is Moroccan and spoke seven languages fluently Your dad is the son of first-generation immigrants from Ukraine and Lithuania What was your childhood like And what values did you learn from your parents | |
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| Ooh my childhood liked boy that's one for a psychotherapist Um you know it was uh we had a big family We had a family of six We operated as a team We um uh moved from air force base the air force base And uh we're a bit nomadic And uh as you said multicultural so uh we were always an oddity everywhere We went on the Plains of North Dakota the desert of California or the Northern uh Plains of Texas to have sort of a Jewish Moroccan family that appreciated uh Taj Jean and tacos and T-bone was kind of a rear uh a weird combo you know my mother had an expression which I teach my children that there's no such thing as a stranger There's only the friends you haven't met yet So the value of every human being was a very big value and And overall I'd say I'm more importantly now than ever especially living in Silicon Valley is um they taught us that a wealth wasn't defined by the size of our wallets but by uh the richness of the people in our lives | |
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| One of the things that I like most about you is that your educational path did not follow that which people might expect of a future assistant secretary of energy I also had a pretty untraditional educational path Um tell us about yours What did you study and and what did you learn that may be unique to others Who who did take that traditional | |
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| Yeah so the first most important lesson for me was that a curious And insatiable curious mind that enjoys lifelong learning and appreciates that you don't stop growing as long as you continue learning uh means that you you know you have fusion energy on the inside that your your path isn't the pedigree processing you know pathway norms that is meant to you know clean your you know um uh record inside of some sort of institution to make who you are but that it's internal and that you generate who you are And so for me that was a lot of wanderlust That was a lot of backpacking I mean I uh there were intervals in my life where I took a year off or two years off to roam around South America and Antarctica and South Georgia and and and uh you know go see the world and and um uh you know sort of the George Bernard Shaw thing the only time you know I wasn't learning was while I was in class | |
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| know | |
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| that they that's not completely true I've loved many of my professors and and gotten on with them but by far most of my learnings have been And an insatiable drive to be amongst people in far flung flung places and to relate to their history and their cultures and the things that have brought us together as a species | |
| _________________ | |
| Hmm Which relates very closely to what you did study Um I believe you attended rice university where you studied Uh political and religious studies And then following race you went on to study international finance at the university of Hong Kong and then earned a master's in comparative Asian studies Um and so it sounds like people are at the core of what you have found to be most interesting or at least what you've chosen to study | |
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| Yeah I mean I was found myself in Pakistan in the mid nineties building the first private power plants in in Karachi which was a war zone which was the only reason at 20 something year old kid could be in Pakistan you know because no smart person with a frontal lobe would be there But but I enjoyed it because I liked touring around Gundara land and climbing K2 and yeah And going up into the SWAT Valley and all these places that are now occupied by a L Gajda But but the but the I enjoyed it so much because um uh I was meeting people and people say where are you in engineer And know you know well you're building a power plant You must be an investment banker No Okay Well what did you study I studied religious studies W w they're like well why And it's like well there's no investment bankers or engineers who can get a posh tune and a C and a Cyndi and a Parsis around a table to have a multicultural negotiation for a productive outcome So you know in the spirit of eclectic uh ecumenical American social alchemy um you know religious as it turns out knowing your religious deepest most passionate beliefs and trying to reconcile them right It's quite fundamental to erecting a power station | |
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| I want to hear more about that in a second I know prior to that you started your career in energy in 1988 first at a small independent uh Texas power developer and then later a large international developer based in Hong Kong while those two were very different experiences I'm curious if you were to summarize one lesson from your early career in energy what would it be | |
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| It would be never be intimidated by size or reputation It that it always comes down to people that uh uh people in point of contact make the difference And uh you know I always tell people when they're stuck about socialist medicine or private medicine and healthcare it always comes down to the nurse in the room And her heart and her acumen and her capability whatever the master system is And it's the same like that people get you know in all of a big company now Tesla which was a small company When when I met Desley is now a big company and people go Oh my God that's a big brand It's a big company And so was GE And so as Eastman Kodak And so it was Exxon at one time but all these things change and morph on the back of people So that Margaret Mead principle that it only takes a few people to change the world That's all that ever has You know I I definitely fortified that as an early uh uh developer. [INSERT GOOGLE/NEXTRACKER ADS HERE] 2: Challenges / And Wins: Digs deep on his days at the DOE nad talks about George Schultz as a mentor. | |
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| After a decade of building fossil fuel power plants around the world. Andy got pulled into the wind business and founded enter Corp in 1999. The company financed and developed wind farms in Europe, north America, Asia, and the middle east. As Andy got deeper into wind, he realized it had the potential to rival any other source of energy, but the industry was thinking small. | |
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| so the crazy breakthrough uh that I had was um uh which is just ridiculous now in retrospect Yeah But um was that I went to all the technologists who were consumed with the bets curve and the output efficiency and and getting their subsidies from Denmark in California And I said what if we put these where it's really windy What if we actually found where it's really windy And we got all that free fuel and we just made an unbelievable amounts of them And they were like that'll never happen All the technologists were like that can't happen We've got to we're going to get our subsidy We're going to finish the beds curve blah blah blah And um So and there was no wind measurements in those days There was no there was no wind regimes There was So it was so preposterous idea that the biggest wit my partners Vestus the biggest wind company in the world thought it was nutty you know to think in terms of 200 megawatt wind farms 400 megawatt wind farms And so I decided you know what based again on this religious studies in my wanderlust I decided where people name the wind It's going to be really windy So I need to study the indigenous names for the wins You know the Chinook wins and the Strall wins and where I can find that I can measure it we can manage it we can harness it and we can sell it to bankers So that was sort of the basis of intercore was a supersizing wind company That was really what it was meant to be And then my lesson came in that in terms of all the beneficence it was being created | |
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| As a as a CEO um I'm curious everyone we've had on what it takes who is a founder has started and led a company They have come within months weeks days sometimes hours of shutting shutting their doors myself Uh with with the entirety of the seven years that you were leading Intercorp did you ever think it might fail And how close did you ever come to | |
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| Multiple times and almost every day until I cashed out you know uh you know I'm definitely from the Andy Grove school of only the paranoid survive but but no no I mean I started with the sleeping on the couch and then I squatted in a corner office in a building that Mick Jagger owned on Wellington Avenue in London so um I it was always a struggle because everything was new There was no path It wasn't venture sort of situation It was I characterize it as you know like Magellan's crew like eating shoe leather to get around the world kind of thing And and um but we and and then the and then playing chicken with my much larger partners you know with Vestas and and res out of England McAlpine engineering who I ultimately sold it to you I had to play chicken you know when they thought you were too small and we're going to buy you out And I Be like you can't buy me out and was swagger I'd leave the table negotiating for two or three weeks And to be like please God let him come back to the table let them come back to the table please I've got to eat you know and eventually it did and it all worked out But um yeah no the sweat was always there | |
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| Hmm Um so fast forward to 2005 George W. Bush nominates you to be the ninth assistant secretary of energy uh to lead E R E where you were unanimously confirmed by the Senate Uh you are not uh nominated a minutes The war on terror the highest gas prices we had ever seen Um despite those challenges under your leadership you grew the budget from a billion dollars When you joined to 2 billion when you left what was it like leading EERE at the time How did it shape your view on government and the role of government | |
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| Well it was definitely a don't waste a crisis to quote Rama Manuel type of situation And and it was a uh you know I had a mixed blessing that my father had been in the military for three decades and then went on to work for the government So I had a built-in advisor but I actually had no experience working in government and the Sort of you know archaic management practices in a very hierarchical culture et cetera I was very lucky that I worked for one of the greatest uh venture capitalists polymathic Renaissance men who you'd never hear of because of his humility and a guy named Sam Bodman who actually was a grad and a professor in a region or a trustee at MIT So he gave me broad permission to uh for my little secret plan of having uh the government uh sprinkle a little bit of goodness verification validation of different technologies that had been Um uh creating dust in our national laboratories and set up a um a cross-fertilization of DNA with Silicon Valley with Boston with Austin with risk-takers And so people either credit or blame me for clean tech one Um I like to think it's credit in retrospect certainly didn't feel that way most of the last decade but but the but you know I remember debating with John Doerr when I first went to Silicon Valley whether we should call it green tech or clean tech and what was most passable and all of this and and um And I think that uh it was so it was exciting It was exciting because I had broadened licensed to problem solve very acute problems in the middle of a war And I spent my first day and I took my staff um you know the civil servants um uh I saw who would come with me and I said we're going to go to Walter Reed hospital And we're going to go to see Admiral Mahoney at NOAA Who's in charge of of the climate uh what we call the the the blue group or the blue team And and um we um and so we had those two visits on climate and on security on the first day And and it made that office and the department of energy A real tip of the spear focal point for problem solving so much so that in the end we ended up assuming the leadership position for climate negotiations that got us back into uh the global uh you know after a 10 year hiatus from Kyoto I was a principal that led the negotiations in Bali for um for the Bali roadmap which was the precursor to Copenhagen and then Paris So so they so they were really go-go days at DOE and it was because of Sam's Open license and embrace of our strategy to activate private sector risk takers stimulate entrepreneurs and campuses and and invite the rest of the nation into a revolution that had been largely sequestered behind the walls of our national labs. | |
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| Andy left his mark on the government, but he didn't stop there. After he left the department of energy in 2008, he became a venture investor at vantage point capital partners, making bets on companies like Tesla and nest. And then he turned his focus to helping other entrepreneurs and investors scale. The next generation of climate tech companies. Um In 2013 you joined X which is alphabets moonshot factory alphabet being the parent company of Google as a senior strategist And you also joined Emerson collective as a member of the executive team during which time you co-founded elemental accelerator Now you serve as chairman at elemental labs senior strategists X while also being in the board of a bunch of places including MIT media lab given all you've done What do you see as your role in the ecosystem today | |
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| My role in the ecosystem is to um adapt myself uh from being a Luke Skywalker into Yoda and and to and to be the best Yoda I can be Um I've I've lost my own personal Yoda um uh George Schultz a few weeks ago And uh George was the one who literally uh Took me in with all my brashness and uh and taught me how to uh stack the rocks and lift the uh X wing fighter out of the swamps And and um and I need to pay that forward with excellence and with more impact And so um uh you know while while it's generous to say that I co-founded uh elemental accelerator With uh with Dawn um I tend to give all the credits to to uh to the Dawn and Emily's and and all the all the people that are doing the heavy lifting and are sweating and are are managing people day to day And and I have sort of uh an opportunity to help make their journeys more frictionless And two and more connective and to accelerate them uh because they innately have more uh escape velocity than I have but I have more tricks and routes and maps and connections to uh hopefully foster a greater growth | |
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| to your point on sharing with others and the way that George Schultz shared with you I know he was one of your greatest mentors and teachers Um what is the the kind of single greatest lesson that you learned from George | |
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| So many I mean for me George was this guy who w w work with Reagan and we took down the wall and the cold war This is when Republicans had some normalcy and so forth George told me the story about Reagan getting back in the car after that monumental speech and and questioning himself and saying did that come out right And he said well what do you mean It was perfect and you marked it up And and he said I I said tear down this wall And I meant to say this wall will come down And and he said well you know I think the other is the right any and he said but but he but Schultz said he always preferred that ladder because Reagan had this UN UN uh uninhibited uh unrelenting insistence On the outcome of goodness and right And and the assertion that the wall will come down as opposed to challenging somebody else to bring it down he said was more Reagan And he said and he said that's He said that's where we have to be You've got to have your true North and your calibration And you've got to know that you will achieve the outcome And that's one of my favorite Schultz lessons but there are so many. | |
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| Throughout your life you have been a founder of venture capitalist a government official while also being a partner to your wife and apparent to your four daughters What's it been like being all of those things at once | |
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| I guess you got to ask me because if you ask them it'll be a different question It'd be different | |
| _________________ | |
| Well I want to know what you would say and then what they would say | |
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| Um it's been it's been joyfully productive and earnestly ambitious And um uh at times it begs cognitive dissonance There were times where I would ask the presidents leave uh and uh and and uh and leave the white house and literally run home to my car to get home in time to to read to my oldest daughter Caroline at night And and Um and then there have been times where I've missed you know a significant um uh family events that that um all will always haunt me that I don't get those moments back Um so there's a degree of cognitive dissonance but as I said the public service ethos runs really In fact just the service ethos just the um it runs really strong in my family and and um yeah And I have always felt a compelling need to model that even when I probably didn't model the best um Ozzie and Harriet uh you know a situation at home or leave it to Beaver | |
| _________________ | |
| Hmm Would they have a similar answer | |
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| Yeah I hope and think that they're proud of their dad Um I don't ever ask that from them and I don't ever try to sway their journey Um you know I have beautiful unbelievable girls as any dad would say but but um and they're all on different journeys They're all remarkably different And And even with them now I'm getting to be a much better Yoda than a um than a Skywalker Um you know of course my youngest is raised by YouTube and Tik TOK So you know she's you know I'm just a uh I'm just a peripheral buyer of a hardware for her at this So | |
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| Um all four of your daughters have very cool middle names Could you tell us their middle names and then tell us are you hopeful for their future as it relates to climate | |
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| Oh yeah absolutely I'm hopeful for their future And I'm hopeful that they contribute to the future That makes it more whole um yeah so Caroline's middle name is hope Um and she was born she's a nine 11 babies She literally you know Maria and I made the split decision to move to America went by coming to New York right When the towers came down and that we you know she was in Stockholm I was in Casa Blanca We met at Heathrow Came to New York when the flight plan was lifted and we got pregnant and and uh so Caroline had to be named hope Um and then we thought well you know the rest of our girls you know we didn't know how many we'd have and we didn't know they'd all be girls but but uh you know Jenny was faith and Julia's love and and Hannah is joy And um and so yeah that's a useful reminder of family values It'll be a useful Crip sheet when they have these interviews down the road and your family values Hopefully they see here's my middle that's my middle name | |
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| Um they can literally say that Um I know speaking of family you've been dealing with a lot in Texas caring for friends and family and then it was just last week that nearly four and a half million Texans were left without power due to an unprecedented winter storm And temperatures that overwhelmed the state's uh grid and great usage um most are back online now but You know millions of people are still dealing with the aftermath the events of last week exposed an energy system that is not prepared for the climate crisis And we've seen the deadly consequences that that lack of preparation has you know you've personally been working to just keep your own parents warm and safe over the past two weeks Um how are you doing with all of that And then what is what needs to happen in Texas | |
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| Yeah thanks for asking It's uh uh yeah there's a there it's been a fragility I tell people that growing up in Texas if you don't like the weather just wait a few minutes And it's true Not even a few days after the coldest temperatures I've ever felt here And I'm talking to aunt Arctica cold you know negative 18 windshield and and so forth that you know we were at 80 degrees you know 96 hours later So you think about an 80 degree swing You know I mean it it it's just unheard of uh even for Texas but but the um um but I've been through hurricanes in Texas I've been through you know three or four twisters touching down near our homes unbelievable lightning storms and wind And I've never been as horrified as losing the heat with my 90 year old father at home I mean that was absolutely a life and death you know fill in the bathtubs and making sure that candles were you know the matches were nearby and the whole thing right And and um so it it brings to you how important our in our industry is you know you it's it's you never notice it unless you don't have it It's that old um you know what you want is a cold beer in a warm shower and you only care if you don't have either And and um and so so um uh of course I've talked with a lot of great Texans like Pat wood who was one of the original design architects on the system here and uh so much at FERC And and I think that um um it's The system itself is not as bad as as um those who are opponents of it would like to paint it Um uh the implementation of the system the management the governance the intelligent execution uh um around the system was uh poor and flawed And ill-prepared Um that doesn't mean you Chuck the system because Texas widely has had one of the best systems Right And and and just look at the renewable energy numbers in Texas there's a reason why it's the number one most hospitable recipient state to large-scale gigawatts of renewable energy investment right That system affords it much easier than others You know the the the crest the the uh large renewable energy transmission is bought up into this market based system et cetera other States that we should have that nationally But that's the point that electrons and Americans really shouldn't be insulated to such a degree by state and political jurisdictions And certainly not by ideological preferences we really need to have a ubiquitous fungible Universal equitable access to clean affordable secure energy We have the technological means we have the capital you know available Well the only thing we haven't had is the uh sufficiency of leadership and vision the type of stuff that brought us you know the Hoover dam or grant Cooley which you know you can argue about it in hindsight of like you know we should take them down this and that and the other But in 1910 when we were building out the West you know this is grand vision Our railroads were grand vision The interstate highway system is grand vision So staying with a balkanized not interconnected three grids and pretending that we're in different countries is not a healthy way for Americans to be at a time that we should bind be binding up the wounds of the nation and finding ways to become closer Yeah And and uh but we need somebody to step up with on that And and uh I'm hopeful that maybe some of the listeners today will but we live in such a new era of self doubt That it is alien and unfamiliar to me And so so I'm always looking for the builders to the people who don't let the rocks in the pathway uh define their route that they basically going to go over under around or through. [MUSIC CUE TO ACCENTUATE LAST COMMENT] | |
| _________________ | |
| Speaking of leadership given the outcomes of the election but also looking beyond that beyond the next four years beyond party what does the future of energy and mobility look like | |
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| Oh I think yeah it looks great I think it's going to be uh all those things I just said it's going to be cleaner It's going to be more affordable Heck it may be free You know it's going to be more secure one hopes that we may learn by heart examples just as we did with this winter in Texas we may learn it through a cyber attack as we just did with the Russians You know so I hope that we have more preemptive inoculated forward planning but whether by design or by default we are going to move into the future with an amount of innovation that overwhelms incumbency And and uh and you you consistently hear both the pundits and the doubters and the incumbents argue for why all of this is insignificant You know I had the great pleasure of having one of the first rides in the first Tesla in the beta Okay And everybody say that's never going to happen signing up for old Lotus cars with engine battery backpacks never happened As 14 years ago you know when I left office there wasn't a single led commercially available on a shelf You wouldn't build a building today or a city light system without led lighting And it always begins with doubt and mockery and marginalization and it always ends with Eastman Kodak with 80% market share going gosh I thought we could sell just one more 35 millimeter canister what happened you know And that's how this is going to evolve I have nothing but faith in our innovation complex to overwhelm all parent company attributes that are holding us back. [MUSIC RISES AND RESOLVES] | |
| _________________ | |
| On that note we are going to close with our high voltage round So these are quick questions quick answers quick meaning like ten second answers starting with if you were going to be an animal what animal would you be and why | |
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| I'd be an Eagle or a penguin but I think I'd be an Eagle Penguins are so fast and agile and collective and community but Eagles are are you know when you say you can't store the Eagles if you walk around with turkeys I love the idea of soaring and and having a whole purview of the arc of the earth and seeing all the world's magnificence since I'm not an astronaut I think an Eagle is probably as close as can get | |
| _________________ | |
| if you did choose penguin there's been one other penguin on what it takes And it was our very first guest which was Dick Swanson the founder of SunPower | |
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| Okay Good company I love penguins | |
| _________________ | |
| If you were to start a new career tomorrow if you had to what would it be | |
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| I'd be a writer | |
| _________________ | |
| Hmm what would you write | |
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| I would write a book that's been in my head for a long time called backpacker in the boardroom | |
| _________________ | |
| Oh I like that You should write that I'd read it | |
| ___________________ | |
| Okay good I'll sign you a perk on it for a book jacket | |
| _________________ | |
| perfect Perfect Um other than yourself to whom do you attribute your success | |
| ___________________ | |
| Uh my parents uh my my sensibility in the divine and and uh trying to keep myself humble in the face of far greater acts of creation | |
| _________________ | |
| Hmm Like I said poetic uh when have you failed | |
| ___________________ | |
| Constantly uh daily I fail but I believe in the blessings of a skin knee And I believe in learning I believe failure is the key to learning and I'm real patients about learning So I failure doesn't bother me I I I view it as a gift | |
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| Hmm What lesson has taken the longest to learn | |
| ___________________ | |
| Fatherhood I'm still learning And uh I don't think I'll stop learning to the day I die but um it's you know the peace Corps used to have a great commercial is the hardest job you'll ever love And uh it's that and I'm still learning | |
| _________________ | |
| Hmm What's the best investment you've ever made | |
| ___________________ | |
| The best investment I've ever made Commercially would probably be nest Um Personally would be in um falling in love and creating a family | |
| _________________ | |
| When are you your best self | |
| ___________________ | |
| I am my best self when being productive and helping others and being alone and still In nature in ecosystems that are larger than me and that I do not control | |
| _________________ | |
| What is your worst trait | |
| ___________________ | |
| Worst trait is um Well I got a lot of those too Um uh I would say it's a um um it's an impatience that is uh becoming less worse over time but it's still um I am impulsively about um um time management | |
| _________________ | |
| If you could change one thing about the world what would it be | |
| ___________________ | |
| You know this feels like a miss America you know answer right up in the booth | |
| _________________ | |
| Don't worry You're winning | |
| ___________________ | |
| cause I'd say world pieces uh you know certainly up there but I uh I think I think whatever language it is I'd have everyone automatically know it Even if it was a second language for everyone I if I could change one thing about the world everybody would be born with a access to a common language | |
| _________________ | |
| I love that that's really creative Um if there was just one person who is going to hear this podcast who would you want it to be | |
| ___________________ | |
| I'd want it to be my mother who's passed yeah | |
| _________________ | |
| Um finish these sentences for me Companies fail because | |
| ___________________ | |
| uh insufficient humility excess hubris | |
| _________________ | |
| Hmm If you really knew me you would know | |
| ___________________ | |
| That I am deeply romantic | |
| _________________ | |
| success is | |
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| The opportunity to know true love and to be loved by a family and community | |
| _________________ | |
| If the world knew me for one thing it would be | |
| ___________________ | |
| it would be it would be my belief that there's goodness in everyone | |
| _________________ | |
| Hmm Last question to build a successful company What it takes is | |
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| persistence | |
| _________________ | |
| Andy that concludes this recording of what it takes I am a huge fan of yours I'm deeply grateful that you're willing to do this And thank you for being in the world and doing everything you've done and everything you will do | |
| ___________________ | |
| so mutual I'm so honored to be asked and I'm so honored to have a chance to talk to my friends at MIT and and hope that somebody will whatever DM me or look me up so that when I come to MIT they'll go Oh man I heard your podcast with Emily and I show you my super cool invention from the Island of misfit toys. [CREDITS][MUSIC] | |
| _________________ | |
| Andy Karsner is managing partner of Emerson, collective, a senior strategist and space cowboy at ECS and a newly elected activist board member of ExxonMobil. Join us for new stories. Each month of founders who are building a carbon free future, their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs that are transforming our world. I want to thank Google for their support of the show. Find out how Google is accelerating the deployment of next generation. Clean energy with its 24 seven carbon-free goal. Learn more by following the link in the show notes. What it takes was produced by powerhouse in partnership with postscript audio powerhouse partners, with leading corporations and investors to help them lead the next century of clean technology innovation. Our fund powerhouse ventures invests in founding teams, building innovative software to rapidly transform our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more@powerhouse.fund that's powerhouse dot F U N D. Our executive producer is Stephen Lacey. Our producers are Jamie Kaiser, rice story Fisher, and Emma McDonough. Sean Markwan mixed the episodes and composed our music. I'm Emily Kirsch. This is what it takes. [ADD CLAP] |
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Watt It Takes is our monthly podcast that tells the stories of founders who are building a carbon-free future — their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs that are transforming our world. We’re proud to have Google as our exclusive launch sponsor.
