The Beginning
I am excited to announce the formation of Among & Between, a new advisory consulting firm focused on the strategy, tools, and relationships that will enable the global climate transformation. Among & Between builds upon twenty years of experience navigating the thorniest partnerships - from private-public sector negotiations to cofounder breakups, from securing first customer contracts to negotiating $50M land-and-expand commercial partnerships.
My personal journey this past year focused on how I should re-enter the climate fight after taking a few years off to work in other tech sectors. I had learned much from my earlier Cleantech 1.0 experience building wind farms, working in Fortune 500 sustainability consulting, and launching startups - but I knew I needed to understand the current Climate Tech market forces. Fortunately, amazing organizations like Terra.do, MCJ Collective, and AirMiners have excellent resources and networks to support rapid learning.
Through that journey meeting with founders, investors, business leaders, and government and advocacy experts, I found that a core set of challenges faced by every Climate Tech company can simplified into challenges of among and between:
Each company exists among a complex ecosystem of customers, suppliers, traditional and nontraditional investors, and a wide variety of external stakeholders ranging from academic researchers to NGOs.
Each founder’s financial outcome may be determined by the deep relationship forged between the company and a government agency, between the startup and its first investors, and between the sales team and an enterprise customer-turned-acquirer.
Over the last year, the question I kept running into seemed annoyingly unsolved but certainly solvable:
How should a team focused on building technology understand and shape an emergent market with so many different types of actors?
What strategies and governance innovations are needed - in parallel with the technology innovation - to navigate these partnerships and achieve scale?
Is that work led by the sales function, government relations, marketing or corporate strategy - or … does the work fall in-between teams and the value remain hidden?
Pulling back from the problems faced by a single company, careful study of the climate challenge shows that global action in every sector is needed to solve the global crisis. In this massive economic transformation, every person, every industry, every community, and every country sits among a network of peers facing a similar set of problems.
My goal in forming Among & Between is to face this collective challenge head on with a common set of tools. To help clients - startup founders, investors, and business leaders - build situational awareness of their markets, create strategies to win at scale, and deliver tools to help them solve these problems. I will have more to share about my firm’s work in the coming months. In the meantime, please share with friends or colleagues who might want to learn more or reach out to find a time to connect.