Kyle Adkins is a partner at FullCycle Climate Partners. FullCycle invests to accelerate the deployment of technologies that address our greenhouse gas crisis.  Before joining FullCycle--and moving to Pasadena--Kyle worked in growth equity at Savano Capital Partners. Kyle, welcome to the podcast.

Good to be here.  Did I describe FullCycle and it's focused on greenhouse gases correctly?

Absolutely. I mean that, that is, we are focused on climate critical technologies that can abate significant greenhouse gas emissions. That's what We were built, to. 

Great. Well, yeah, let's keep rolling with full cycle and tell me more about what you're investing in.

Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, we're very much focused at a critical juncture between, early stage venture and late stage private equity and infrastructure capital, And so we have, uh, an innovative model where we invest in both the company, as well as their large infrastructure projects, their first commercial projects that actually take the technology from being developed, proven, and validated to actually, you know, large commercial scale. and so are all your investments, physical infrastructure 

Correct. Everything is going to be, CapEx heavy, you know, we're building large, physical plants and infrastructure is visible of our phones.

And so tell me more about that gap. So I had a Erin Fike on the show and he does like, traditional VC, right. It's sort of software investing. Yeah. So, basically like the way to think about this is that, traditional early stage venture capital is.

great about building out technology, getting it to that point where it's ready for full scale commercialization. With software, it's much easier to start generating revenue because the cost of actually getting to that point of actually commercializing it and getting paying customers is much, much lower.

 On the climate side. However, you might have one customer for a facility who can be 10, 20, $30 million of revenue from a single customer. You don't see that in software.

It's a very different game. And so it's a, it's just a different in that sense that you have to build large infrastructure. But then I know, like in , software land, you know, you get excited if you've got a three or five-year customer, who's writing a six-figure check in. Yeah. We know we're looking at customers who are writing seven or eight figure checks annually that are committed, contracted recurring for 10, 15, 20, 25 years, 

And so it's a very different game where you've got that activation energy. Uh, but on the other hand, you have very late stage, private capital like private equity or infrastructure where they're very used to investing in proven commercialized technology.

So they're looking for stuff that has thousands of hours of operating data has some commercial proof points where they can show. They've got a couple of years of P and L that shows that the cash flows are there. And then they're more than happy to compete on their cost of care. We're basically the bridge between those two walls.

We call us the deployment gap And so how much money is someone raising when they come to you? What is sort of a typical deal?

I mean, you know, the, the interesting part of this is that most of the time, because our model is, not something that is widely seen in the market today. Most people are coming in and there, they might be looking to raise 10, 20, 30, $40 million. But the vast majority of that is actually to fund that first commercial facility on their balance. Whereas with our model, what that does is instead of the entrepreneur can say, maybe I only need to raise five or 10 million to the company directly because the balance of that now can be funded in a SPV off balance sheet, more like a traditional commercial infrastructure project. And so it's really an appealing product for entrepreneurs that are out there because now all of a sudden, they're not having to raise $40 million at a 40 million pre money or something like that.

And so that's only having raised. And then at other capital then can be moved off balance sheet into its own traditional, economic, you know, vehicle that they still have, cash flows and things that will accrue back to the company. But then it also, they don't have to suffer the same amount of dilution.

And so it's really its purpose address for like CapEx heavy technology, which is, you know, the traditional venture model isn't perfectly designed. 

Yeah. I just don't know that traditional world. Um, what does that sort of mean to be off balance sheet in this case? Like how does that structure happen?

Yeah. I mean like a good way to think about is, um, you know, with a traditional infrastructure project, if you think about, you know, like the power plant that we have in past, , that is a distinct facility that someone built and that's effectively a company in its own. Right. But there's also underlying technologies.

You know, you might have a combined cycle gas, power plant, you know, I don't know the specifics of that facility, but you know, you've got technology that goes into the actual operations of that. And so what we do is, you know, we're investing. The technology company that would then furnish the technology to a facility that then would be the commercial structure through which you can actually build plant that is required to actually make that technology a commercial reality.

And so those are individual companies in their own, Right. Through kind of an SPV, you know, it's an LLC that you stand up and that's very much kind of how traditional infrastructure capital we'll we'll do things where they'll build individual facilities. And so, you know what we're doing here, is basically, it's a bit of a hybrid between those because when don't have the comfort of having done a couple of these projects that you can attract that infrastructure capital.

It's hard to do traditional project finance. And so what happens is that instead they raise that capital on their balance sheet and then they have to basically build the plant themselves. Okay. No, it makes good sense that you don't want to be raising 30 million out of 40 posts. so, um, is there a good example company where you guys have made that sort of investment?

Yeah. So, I mean, um, the last deal that we just closed on his company called Evernote that's in the circular fashion industry where they effectively take, you know, textile waste in the front. And, uh, can basically break it down and regenerate it into, you know, the fibers and the pulp that's required to eventually spin that into new recycled textiles.

And the great thing that's really exciting about it is, is that, you know, when you look at a lot of the other players that are out there, that recycling process traditionally will weaken the fibers to where maybe they can be regenerated once, or it'll get down cycled, or there's a lot of different flavors that you'll see out there.

But with every news process that actually strengthens the fibers through that process. And so now you can actually regenerate it multiple times. And so what we're doing is that they've done some limited commercial pilot plant runs with folks like Levi's target and probably most prominently Stella McCartney.

They had a collaboration with Stella McCartney at Adidas. They got these cool hoodies that they do. And the big part of that is that now all of a sudden, you've got a pilot that has shown that the model works.

And so now we're moving to the process of actually building a large scale facility down in south Caroline. And so , that's where you take this from small lot, individual runs for one-off use cases to actually turn this into a continuous manufacturing process that can be processing tens of thousands of tons per year of product.

And really moved the ball forward to be able to meet the demands of the folks who want to buy the product that comes out of those facilities as well, they don't necessarily want to step up until you get to a certain level of scale.

So you get caught in this chicken or the egg dynamic. You can't build a facility unless you know that the commercial demand is there, but then you can't get the commercial demand if you don't have the facility. 

So I want to ask about the different areas of focus, but let me stay on every new for a second I would put them in the circular economy bucket. Right. 

how big is the circular economy? I feels like something that comes up a lot lately.

I mean the circular economy is trillions of dollars. I mean best way for us to think about is that talking about climate bra. You really, if you want to achieve the goals or getting anywhere close to achieving the goals that everyone talks about, that whether that's the one and a half degrees of warming or two degrees that everyone is now kind of moving towards.

Unfortunately, it's going to require a complete redoing of the economy and a lot of. And if you think about how big the economy is, you know, that's trillions of dollars. You know, we think that could be at least a $42 trillion market opportunity. people always talk about, you know, the six, seven, $8 trillion annually that we have to invest in infrastructure in order to meet our sustainability goals.

 And when you think about when you're really having to basically lay down 21st century infrastructure and replacing the legacy dirty 19th and 20th century infrastructure, Vast parts of the economy. That is a massive opportunity. So when you look at circularity, that is one of the biggest aspects that cross cuts all these different, industries that we look at, you know, whether you're looking at waste agriculture, , you know, batteries recycling and then fashion, 

One of the things that a lot of people don't appreciate is that fashion on its own can contribute up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And it's one of those things that traditionally, when you see that wheel that talks about, you know, all the various sources of greenhouse gas emissions, uh, it's not one that traditionally comes up, you know, you'll see ag and energy and power, and sometimes you'll see transportation, but really when you break it down and you add up all the different pieces of the supply chain, that fashion contributes to, it can be in that, you know, as high as eight or 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

And so that, I think that's one of the biggest insights that we've found from this is that, the opportunity to abate significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions is very much a proxy for the size of the market opportunity as well.

Because if it's that big of an emissions issue, it's that big of an industry that you're going after as well. 

Yeah. So how do you evaluate, like, how do you take sort of the ESG lens or the environmental lens on investments? You're making.

Yeah. so, part of what's different about our view on climate is that we're very focused on what's called a short-lived climate pollutants. And we were very encouraged coming out of, the recent cop 26. Because there was the global methane pledge, and this has been something that we've been working on and advocating for a while that, you know, CO2 is obviously a big problem.

It is the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions. But if you look at it on the next 20 years, 1% of the gas, the actual molecules that get in there. Contributes to 43% of the warming. And that's primarily a methane nitrous oxide, F gasses and other short-lived plant pollutes 

And so from our perspective and the way we look at this, as we say, if you can tackle those short-lived climate pollutants, you're going to get a higher return on investment in a shorter timeframe in terms of your class. impact. And so we actually had developed a proprietary metric that we call carbon return on investment over 20, which means instead of the traditional metrics where people will look at the global warming potential over the next 100 years, which heavily weights towards CO2.

Instead we will look at it on the next 20 years, which instead brings into focus the much shorter term warming effects from methane nitrous, oxide, F gases, and those other short-lived time. 

Educate me a little bit more on methane. and what the, I didn't follow very closely. The pledge came out of cop 26.

Yeah. So the big thing there is that, you know, one molecule of methane can be, 82 sometimes, 90 or a hundred times more potent than a molecule of CO2. And so, everyone has always been focused historically on CO2 and how do we abate CO2?

And that's, you know, the biggest driver of long-term warming, but when you look at nothing, it's been kind of the hidden warming gas that everyone has not really focused on until very recently. One of the more interesting insights that's been developed and can thank space for that actually in a lot of ways, uh, is that.

the state of California commissioned a satellite to fly over the state back in 2019, looking what they thought would be the largest sources of methane emissions, which would be a landfill. So even though we've got a lot of great state-of-the-art landfills that are kept and closed and are supposed to be trapping all of them that hand emissions, the underlying hypothesis.

Was that there were significant leakage that was contributing to the warming potential specifically over California to their shock and dismay. One of the biggest components of that was oil and gas pipelines was actually methane leakage from the infrastructure and oil. 

Yeah.

And so, you had both the leakage from oil and gas, but then you also had all these landfills that they thought were locked, sealed, and good to go.

And so all of a sudden they looked and they said, oh my gosh, there's nothing everywhere. And they thought that, you know, California is very much a leader on climate and even they had not really gotten their arms around the significance of the methane problem and how much that was contributing to the warming for the state of California. And climate is not a border, problem. You know, it doesn't stop at the California border. And so, it really put a focus that we need spend more time looking at methane and where those sources of emissions come from, which can be very different from when you're looking at sources of CO2 emissions. 

And so how do you abate that 

You know, so one of the biggest sources of methane is rot. So if you can get things out of landfills and if you can get things not burned. So for example, getting back to Evernote, you know, the, two most likely outcomes for. Is, uh, you know, it'll either go into a landfill and then eventually that will break down into methane because it will rot or it will get incinerated.

Uh, that is one of the dirty secrets of the industry is that even, you know, a lot of these consumer take back programs that you'll see and things like that, they don't have a good grip on what happens when it goes to the quote unquote risks. And oftentimes what happens is that that textile waste , that people think are going to get regenerated into new materials or whatever it might look like as I've just getting incinerated.

And the by-product from incineration is a lot of bad greenhouse gases. 

 Anything else? What is the, what is the wheel called? You just referenced that wheel. That shows where all, but gas has come from.

Yeah, it's just like your typical pie chart that people will talk about where they say, you know, a hundred percent of the greenhouse gas emissions and where are the industries that are the biggest sources of greenhouse gas pollution. 

What are some of the surprising things there?

Well, I mean, I, think the, you know, the surprising thing there?

is that, you know, for example, like everyone always talks about electric vehicles and how that's going to be a significant contributor. It isn't, it. So it really depends. You know, for example, you also have to look at what does it cost from a climate perspective to actually build that car.

and there's still, you know, there's a lot of work that's still being done in to making the actual production of that car being more climate friendly, because you know, to find the lithium for batteries, uh, that requires a lot of mining and heavy machinery that may not be the most climate friendly machinery yet.

and also then you are charging with electrical infrastructure that may not be the cleanest of charging infrastructure. You know, if your hooked up to a solar grid, from your home, for example, then, you know, obviously that's a lot better, but not everyone has access to that. You know, if you're going to your local supercharger that may or may not, you know, just be using, you know, grid, power that comes primarily from coal and natural gas.

And so, that all is incremental. Like, don't get me wrong. Like I want to see more and more electric vehicles 

on the road today. 

But the contribution is actually not as significant as people would've thought relative to decarbonizing the electrical grid, decarbonizing heavy industry de-carbonizing agriculture.

Those are going to have a much larger impact than, electric vehicles collectors. I think I remember that energy use in buildings higher or contributes more than transportation. 

right. That's like a great example. 

Can you explain that? Like, where is that building buildings?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's all of the above. So, um, starting with the building, you know, two of the largest sources of building materials is going to be steel and cement, which are massive sources of greenhouse gas emissions. you know, traditionally those industries are powered by.

because you need to generate significant amounts of heat as part of those processes to generate steel and cement. and then also part of the process, they actually generate CO2 as well. So when you're actually making segmentations material, for example, like CO2 is a byproduct, , of that process.

And so, , you've got the inputs on the front end in terms of actually building, but then when you get into it, the actual, cooling climate control. So when you think about, um, the amount of energy that is leaked from windows, or, you know, drafty houses, things like that. And then also you got to look at what are the sources of that?

So, you know, for example, like, who has a natural gas oven, most them. 

Right.

, and so, you know, there's a big push right now, right? To electrify all of your home appliances. And then that alongside that you also, might have a gas, power dryer, you know, , with cooling, for example, you know, your F gases, hexafluoride and all of the, coolants out there is a significant contributor, , is one of the most potent gases.

There's not a ton of it relative to methane and nitrous oxide, but in terms of every single molecule, it's extremely bad for the. 

And I think that's really what it boils down to that's , getting to the point today. What turning the corner with climate is is that these solutions are cost-effective. They can actually compete on a cost basis. Look, legacy alternate. And that's something that has not been the case before.

So people have had to do it because they cared, not just because it's, you know, the, the economic low cost option one more question on that. Uh, the F gases, right? are there things I'm supposed to avoid? Like I, you know, I, I remember the hairspray thing. Where do the F gases manifest?

mainly with like air conditioning today. That's one of the biggest things. So, you look at like, you know, dirty legacy HVAC units, whether it's commercial buildings, older homes, things like that. the source of the coolant that actually allows for the heat transfer that allows you to take warm air and turn it into cold air is primarily it's consisting of F gases. 

so kind of zooming out, you referenced the one and a half degrees. I thought we were not allowed to get our planet more than one and a half degrees warmer than it is today and then dire consequences. But, um, did you say that now everyone's talking about two degrees.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's unfortunate, but, um, you know, the, the cost of delay is meaning that, you know, the ability to still meet that goal of one and a half degrees is becoming a higher and higher hurdle. Because what happens is, is that, when a molecule of greenhouse gases goes into the atmosphere, it doesn't go away.

 And so we're getting to that point now where, unless our collective action changes, we're not going to get. And so now people are really talking about, can we keep it under two degrees.

And everyone's still processing all the different pronouncements coming out of cop.

And, we possibly might get under two degrees with that. But I think even with those pronouncements, we're still well, north of two degrees, more than likely with, if everyone just does what they say they're going to do, And there still is not a great track record of the people actually doing what they say they're going to do on top.

I think you said you didn't want to get in too much to the political type stuff, but was there anything else that really stood out for you from cop for those of us that weren't following it super closely?

Well, I think the big thing that, you have, you know, coming out of, cop is just this emphasis that's going to take all of us in order to be able to solve the problem. But I think also the other big takeaway from that is that government's not going to get it.

And so, you know, for the longest time it was always viewed as, you know, governments need to lead the way. but what's happening now, getting back to kinda my earlier point about, , you know, climate critical technology is becoming cost competitive with legacy dirty alternatives. It's going to take the private markets in order to make this happen. And so, you know, funds like full-cycle and all the other ones that are out there that.

We need all the capital that we can get in order to solve this problem. I think that's probably one of the funniest things about working in climate is that, um, every fund that gets raised, every dollar that gets allocated to climate is a win for all of us. Uh, sometimes we should all become climate investors.

some days it feels like everyone is. 

Yet yet. I really believe what you said at the beginning, which is there's still like gaps in certain areas, the gap in funding, these infrastructure or the physical projects. It's really interesting. Um, does carbon sequestration work like you were talking about, you know, we're putting more molecules out there.

I mean, obviously trees do it, right? 

Right, right, right. Yeah, no, I mean, uh, you know that that's obviously, you know, planting more trees. As one of the things that people have been trying to do for a long time and that you know, as all beneficial and that's great. , but unfortunately that alone is not going to solve a problem.

 uh, part of what is driving. The focus these days on carbon sequestration. And what we can do with that is that people basically are looking at this and saying, just stopping what we are doing is not going to be enough.

We actually need to reverse prior action as well. And that's where carbon sequestration comes in. The issue that you have with that is that that is just so far away from making a huge. Um, like, it's a little over a month ago, the largest commercial direct air capture project was commissioned in Iceland.

And I I'd have to go back and look at what the exact figures looked like.

 but the actual impact of it is minuscule and it is the largest ever global facility. One of the biggest issues, if you think about like the atmosphere, composition, greenhouse gas emissions, even though it's becoming a bigger part of the atmosphere is still not a super concentrated gas in the overall app. And so the issue that you have is that you're basically having to capture a ton of air in order to separate out smaller portion of the gas.

And so it's a very inefficient process. And so part of the stuff that folks are really working on is they're trying to figure out ways to , how do we actually concentrate the CO2 and the other greenhouse gas emissions to make it a more efficient capture process? And so there is a ton of money that was going into this.

One of the things that came out of not just cop, but also. You know, a lot of the action that's coming from the us government right now was actually the department of energy declared a moonshot project to make, carbon sequestration, economically viable. and that is the kind of stuff that we're going to need, but I think it's, it's also an interesting distinction where we kind of need it all in the sense of, we need early stage venture capital because they need to be funding the next technologies, but we also have a lot of technology today that can solve the problem that has not been commercially deployed.

So that's where we sit, And then you also need catalytic capital from folks like the government, places like that, to do these much longer moonshot projects, because any one of those buckets is not going to be enough.

You know, you got your later stage, that's going to be deploying massive amounts of solar with. Hopefully nuclear, things like that. but ultimately , at the end of the day, you kind of need all of those buckets. but it's a nuance there that comes about only from maturity, That we saw with venture, you know, we saw much more of a, staging out over time.

You know, no one had talked about seed funding or pre-seed funding. And now all of a sudden there's like 12 different stages of seed funding and you know, all those sorts of things. There's a lot of nuance behind those. And that comes from a much more mature funding environment that you just don't have with climate yet.

But we want to get there obviously.

I'm really impressed how much you know about climate and. And everything else because correct me if I'm wrong, you were doing growth equity, not necessarily focused on climate How did you get into full cycle?

Yeah. So even though I spent my whole career, you know, , investing in high growth technology companies, and I had spent a lot of time, particularly at the intersection between kind of the digital and physical world. And so had, , looked at a lot of either climate adjacent or industrial technology or just stuff that had high impact.

And so I really took a step back and said, okay, what if I'm going to do that?

where do I want to really focus my time? And for me, climate cross cuts a lot of the other major impact issues that are out there today. 

And so I just kind of started going down the rabbit. Yeah. And, uh, all those years of drinking through the fire hose at MIT and places like that, you know, just lied to me being a voracious learner, wanting to read as much as I possibly can. And, uh, you know, one thing led to another. 

Um, and so didn't you tweet at your partner? Um, so I am not active on Twitter in the sense of, I don't put anything, any content out there or anything like that, but I do view it as a great source of information. And so, you know, in my timeline, I retweeted something that the founder of full cycle said about. Just kind of that there's a need for kind of, you know, climate focus, growth equity.

And what does that look like? And I was like, oh, this sounds really interesting. And it is an issue that I had seen in my career with companies I had looked at and evaluated and send them a direct message. I think it was like the second or third direct message I'd ever sent. and you know, we just started talking and one thing led to another from there. 

Wow. And so, yeah. Tell me a little bit more about, was that Abraham, 

Yes. 

tell me more about who else is at full cycle. 

So Brahim is the head of the firm, you know, he's been a long time climate investor dating back to 2002. you know, he was early in Tesla Nuber and folks like that as well. And, know, so he's been very successful in his own. Right. And, you know, basically had seen this problem.

And said, we need to start a fund that's, you know, kind of addressing this issue. And one of the big companies that he was invested in, , was founded by one of our other managing partners. Giffen OTT, who.

you know, basically had come at this from the operating side of the house and, you know, had started his company and they both right or invested or were operating a business.

you know, where's exactly this problem. And one thing led to another, they said, this is a great idea. And, , we need to do more of this from more companies. 

Hmm. do you have thoughts on career navigation for people who just, how have you gone about your own career? Yeah.

I mean, I, thinkwhen I was at MIT, they didn't do as good of a job of really advocating for us. You know, we're kind of the, traditional nerd are supposed to be the engineers. You know, the classic trope was that we go work for people from Harvard and that that's, that's slowly changing.

Uh, you know, there's a lot more CEOs coming out of MIT these days than there used to be. But you know, one of the big things, I feel like. learn as much early on in my career that I regret and have made up for over time is the depth of relationships and the 

ability to actually like keep in touch with people as you go along.

You know, I think that's something the last five years I've been doing a lot of, Hey, we haven't spoken in 10 years and I really regret that And I wish I would have appreciated that point, the value of maintaining those relationships for longer periods of time. And that's something that I feel like no one really told.

 um, you know, they always talk about, you know, mentors, but I feel like that's always feels like a very like strict construct, 

versus just talking about like, Hey, just maintaining high quality networks and high quality people and just keep talking to them and, don't have agendas going into those meetings.

But I still find it so awkward to reach out to people. Hey, I wish we'd kept in touch. But I haven't. and yet now I have a CRM. I mean, now that I'm a VC, I have like a CRM of my relationships, 

Right, right, Yeah. 

, um, let's stay on the personal questions. how do you balance your work in life? I know Kyle you're about to have four kids under four, right?

Yeah, two oldest twins just turned four, 

so, uh, it's definitely, it's, it's a rodeo around here. You know, the benefit of working from home is, that you can be a more present parent.

And I think that's especially true, for me, Where, you know, the emphasis for the longest time has been, you know, you're the ones who go work in the office and then, come home. And my wife works as well. She's got a up and, we're very much strong Pope parents. And, you know, as much as I have historically had the desire to step up and do my equal share of that, sometimes the environment around you is not supportive of that.

And so, you know, Part of what the pandemic brought about was the ability for me to be much more present, What have you learned about climate tech that surprised you.

I think probably like the. Most surprising thing is, and for those that have been in a long time, I think it's, you know, they always talk about, you know, kind of the welcome to climate sort of thing, where, sometimes you can come in very optimistic and you don't appreciate how entrenched the legacy interests are and how hard it is to actually change things.

' cause it's one of those things that, you know, as an intellectual exercise, you know, you look at this technology on paper and you go, this should be a no brainer. And, and it's, I think that's always like a wake up, call to everyone at some point where they go, wow. Like, you know, there are a lot of people who are very committed to. you know, kind of, what's already being done out there you know, I think clients sometimes get so caught up in, how do we change, the dirty legacy past at night. Focused enough on what does a brighter cleaner future look like Is there a way to end on an optimistic note here?

Well, I, I, think flipping that right around, you know, that climate is having its moment, but it's a sustainable moment and I think that's probably the biggest thing that gets me really exciting and going every morning is that, I liken a little bit of like clean tech, 1.0, in the early two thousands to web one, point. 

And, the underlying ideas and the underlying technology was all valid in the night. You know, it was all there. I mean, you look at web van. , I'm sure web van is kicking themselves as it can hold on for a few more years. Right. , but you see that and like, you know, it was just, everyone got ahead of themselves.

And that happened with climate the first time around as well. The difference is, is that in the background, there's been a lot of people who have been slowly steadily building. And this time there is sustainable durable trends behind it. And, um, I view us really in that kind of web 2.0 like moment right now where , client is emerging and it's not going away this time. This is not a flash in the. 

I love that. That's a great note to end on Kyle. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for a full cycle. Thanks for coming on the podcast. 

Perfect. Thanks Minnie. Appreciate the time.