7 Topics People Aren’t Talking About This NYCW 2024

What we'll be saying this NYCW 2024 to sound smart 🧐

As New York Climate Week approaches, lots of people are going to be talking about the same things: how to have cleaner transportation, the potential impacts of the US presidential election, how to get more renewable energy, why AI is good, why AI is bad…and so on.

However, there are five essential topics we think people should be talking about, and we wanted to share them with you. We plan on bringing these up in our convos to sound smart, and now you can too 😎.

Let’s dive in:

Here’s what ChatGPT thinks a green NYC looks like

🚨 Before we dive in, if you want to make the most of your NYCW, check out our recent pod here where we share our best advice on winning the week 🏆

1. Commercialization Talent: The Missing Piece

One of the biggest hurdles for climate tech startups is securing the right commercialization talent. Brilliant founders often excel at the science but fall short in execution. This gap in sales and scaling expertise can make or break a company. We need to focus on building more robust support systems to help founders bridge this gap. The responsibility for this isn’t just on founders: VCs, recruiters, and other service providers all have the play their part.

2. Preparing for a Future of Fragile Infrastucture

Our reliance on high-tech systems has made us vulnerable. We need to focus on building simple, reliable technologies that will function even in the face of potential cyber threats or infrastructure breakdowns. Innovation is important, but for critical systems, stability and reliability are key. Frankly, not enough people in the cyber space are looking at the grid (yet), but we’ve heard enough horror stories about cyber attacks during heat waves to know this is an issue we NEED to solve.

3. How to Exit

GOTCHA — actually our good friends at Third Sphere WILL be putting on an exits event (which you will catch both of us at because the team is incredible and their events are incredible — peak our coverage of their NYCW event last year here).

BUT, this is basically the only one we could find, and you can never have too many conversations about how to make climate tech investible.

Specifically, big tech has come into the energy game, and that’s brought a lot of M&A excitement (see the recent biggest PPA EVER by Microsoft). Is there a new major buyer on the block? Will your public utility finally have some buyer competition? We know founders desperately need that.