Ian: Thanks so much for coming to talk with us today, Matt. I want to start by asking you about the name of your fund: Anthropocene. According to Wikipedia, the term Anthropocene describes the current era, or geological epoch, that we’re in. I wanted to ask if there was a specific reason why you chose that as the name of your fund, and I’m thinking that there might be.
Matt: I think that’s a great place to start and it isn’t usually where people start. I love it because I’m kind of a brand and marketing and storytelling nut. I really believe that you have to come from a core of culture that defines who you are and what you’re trying to build. We’re a deep tech climate fund. Those are words that mean everything and nothing. But the climate is our North Star and deep tech is kind of the how. And we underwrite towards economic mega trends, and we’ll get into that. So the name was very important to us. We kicked around a ton of different names. But my wife and I are both geology nerds – well, we’re nerds in a lot of different verticals to be fair – but we were thinking about the Anthropocene, which is the era of human impact on Earth, and that is such a good brand marker for the fund. We are not against humans having an impact on the Earth. We think we’re always going to be having an impact on the Earth, and it’s about having an intentional impact on the Earth. And that’s kind of our core investment philosophy too. We’re not a green climate impact fund that wants to build an Elvin future where we live totally in harmony with the Earth’s ecology, because I just don’t think that’s in our nature. But it can be in our nature to be respectful of the Earth’s ecology and help regenerate it in a spark and cycle way. So that’s where the name Anthropocene Ventures comes from. We’re nerds is the TLDR of that.
Ian: I like your use of Elvin future. I hadn’t heard that term before, but I immediately knew what you were referring to.
Matt: Yeah, I mean I kind of want that future, but I just don’t think it’s real.
Ian: One of the things that I thought was interesting is that on your fund’s website you talk about how your investment theory is defined both by climate change but also by updated national security concerns. That’s not a pairing that most people usually put together or think of naturally. Do you want to expand on that a little bit?
Matt: Yeah. I went to Cornell for history and politics and applied physics. I then moved to Silicon Valley and have been a tech entrepreneur in that world from the beginning. I think it was 1994 or 1995 when I moved out there. And so I have this particular viewpoint of the world that culture drives everything – including the economic underpinnings for businesses and investments. I’ll take a step back and restate it a different way. Climate doesn’t have a balance sheet. Climate’s a weird word, right? The climate doesn’t mean anything. The ecology of the planet, the planet Earth, does not have a balance sheet or a P&L. I wish it did. I wish we had a balance sheet and we could work off of that, but it doesn’t. So you can’t really invest in climate. And when people say I invest in climate, it’s like I invest in AI. What does that mean? What is that? What do the companies that you are investing in or starting as a founder, what do they do for people or planet? And then you can say, ok – I’ve got an advanced manufacturing company that is better for climate purposes, that is a climate positive, or I’ve got an agriculture startup that is better for the soil on the planet. It regenerates soil health. Ok so you’ve got an agriculture company. That’s the vertical economic sector that you’re working in, that you’re operating in. And so when we start to kind of slice it that way, VCs, economists, and founders always love to verticalize, but the ecology of a planet is not a vertical system. It is a very horizontal system. And so we had to match these two things.
The reason – the North Star – that we started this fund is because we care about climate issues. We don’t want the Earth to burn. I want my kids to have trees. Water security is a big one for me. Soil health is a big one for me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It’s also about the people on the planet. I want them to be working in environments that are not dirty or deleterious or going to give them cancer, right? So I then say if we’re going to have a North Star mission of investing in companies that are positive or have less deleterious effects on the planet Earth and create a better environment for the people on the Earth, whether those are working conditions or whether that’s just atmospheric health, then how are we going to do that in an economically wise way? We’re going to look at economic mega trends that are going to buttress those investments. So how we’re going to underwrite is shorthand for that and we’re going to underwrite towards two economic mega trends – national security being one and the generalized reindustrialization of the West. You can kind of subcategorize that as energy security or domestic supply chains or, you know, there’s lots of ways that all us weirdos in business kind of term this, but it’s really just we’re reindustrializing in the West after we were dominant for so long. And then China took over that dominance. And now we’re trying to get it back. And there’s a ton of money that’s going to get spent there.
Now there are also national security concerns. They’re all kind of the same thing, to be fair. And so we’re going to spend a lot of money on national security stuff. Now that doesn’t mean we invest in missile systems, but it does mean we invest in a company that can create lipids and fats at forward operating bases for the military. And those same technologies can be used for, you know, cities. So it’s got dual purpose. There’s a lot of dual purpose stuff with space. You know the space race that is new in the last five years? We invest in companies that are in that vertical arena too because of the dual use technologies. If you can do it on the way to Mars, it’s probably a very efficient process. And if you’re going to do it here on planet Earth, that’s going to save us from overusing resources and over-leveraging resources. Make sense?
Ian: Makes sense: You might have seen the big news that came out this morning when the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs. Do you think that’s going to fundamentally change the re-industrialization of the West narrative, or what do you think the short and long-term effect is going to be?
Matt: Sure, yeah, heard about it. I think zero long-term effects from the tariffs because they were stupid to begin with and I think the Supreme Court knocking them down was legally the correct thing to do. He’s already slapped 10% tariffs back on everything using some weird 1974 trade law. He’ll go back and forth a million times until he’s gone. I won’t even say his name. He’s ridiculous. You can put that out there. I’m not shy about my politics, and no one should be. I do think that the reindustrialization of the West is somehow in the red world and red-coded and in the blue world bad-coded. But I think that’s dumb. I don’t think it’s, you know, MAGA or Republican to want Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio to have good working class jobs. And I don’t believe we’re ever going to bring manufacturing back the same way. But you know – mainly locally – manufacturing is something that I really want to do. In fact, I want a Star Trek replicator world where we’re manufacturing something in my house. I want something and I build it right. I can see that future and I think that is good for the planet. It’s good for the people on the planet. And I don’t think that is like this anti-globalist thing either.
Just because you can produce something doesn’t mean other cultures don’t have something to give. We could get into politics all day. I won’t, but I do think that the tariffs were a terrible way of trying to bring manufacturing back. In fact, you know, data shows that it didn’t work and I think it’s ultimately going to have nothing to do with this. I think the actual thing that’s going to make manufacturing come back or enable us to have energy independence and food security or have water security is investing in really hyper-efficient technology that uses less raw resources form the planet Earth, and that’s good for the planet. It’s good for the people on the planet. It cuts down on transport pollution. It cuts down on our interdependence – which I don’t particularly care for – but we have interdependence in other ways.
Ian: You know, I’m a long-time Star Trek fan myself. I’ve actually probably seen every, if not almost every episode and I’ve definitely spent a lot of time thinking about what a post-scarcity society would look like if it arrived. Honestly, it’s probably arriving sooner than they forecast it in the classic era TV shows.
Matt: My oldest son is named Jayden, so that’s how much my wife is a nerd from Star Trek. I’m more of a Star Wars guy, which probably doesn’t bode well for the future that I envision will really happen, but we’ll see.
Ian: Yeah, the thing that always fascinated me with Star Wars is that everybody wonders, you know, depending on whether you consider the most recent trilogy canon or not, after the Rebels defeat the Empire and restore the Republic for a couple of years, how do they lose it again when the First Order comes back. Everybody’s like, how could this happen? I don’t know. Maybe there’s an allegory there you can find in the 2024 election.
Matt: Yeah, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched now.
Ian: You want to talk a little bit about your fund’s investment process? At what stage do you typically get involved? How involved are you with your portfolio companies? What does that look like for Anthropocene?
Matt: Yeah, sausage making. So we’re a pre-seed and seed stage fund. My background, I had a company called Rocket Science which grew to a pretty big success story and became really well-known and what our job was for the 15 years that I ran it was to help pre-seed and seed stage venture-backed companies scale to exit and we did it through technology and strategy and finance and business process automation. We did everything that you need to do. Basically, you’d get an institutional check from some VC. They’d hand you my card or one of my salespeople’s cards and they’d say go to them. They’re adults in the room. We would basically go and throw everything out and rebuild everything just the same but with modern technology and secure it and you could just add water and it would grow. So the reason that my partner Jim Boettcher, who started this fund with me in 2022 – he’s a long-term VC. He’s Midas list two times. He’s got a top 10 fund of all time with Focus Ventures, a billion dollars under management. We’ve known each other for a long time. He wanted to start a fund with me because he wanted me to do pre-seed and seed stage scaling help with our portfolio companies in this new arena, which is the deep tech kind of climate world where most of the founders are PhDs, they’re not MBAs. And to be fair to every MBA out there, most MBAs aren’t great startup founders either. They’re good business people for big companies. So they just had no experience being startup founders. These PhDs that have a really whiz bang widget that does something amazing and Jim thought, and maybe rightfully so, that that’s my area of expertise. So I really wanted to focus on pre-seed and seed because that’s where my value add is. You asked me how involved we are with our portfolio companies and it’s as involved as we need to be and that is different for every company. There are founders I literally talk to every day and then there’s a founder or two that I haven’t talked to in eight months. They send me back the details, you know, updates every quarter. So I don’t really need to talk to them because they’re knocking it out of the ballpark and there’s really not much help I can give them. After their Series A raise, we try to help less. That is where we start to say no because we think other people probably can help them more. That doesn’t always work. I just joined the board of a Series B company that’s a portfolio company. So like it’s not a one-to-one, but that’s the general story.
Ian: Awesome. Thank you very much, Matt. It was a pleasure speaking with you.