Ceres Q&A With Nancy Pfund: ‘The progress we are making is undeniable’

Ceres is launch­ing a new Q&A series as part of its Clean Tril­lion cam­paign aimed at ele­vat­ing clean ener­gy invest­ments glob­al­ly by an addi­tion­al $1 tril­lion a year in order to min­i­mize dam­ag­ing cli­mate change impacts. The series will focus on invest­ment thought lead­ers who are paving the way in this fast-grow­ing space. Today’s inter­view is with Nan­cy Pfund, founder and man­ag­ing part­ner of DBL Part­ners, a ven­ture cap­i­tal firm based in San Francisco.

Ceres: DBL Part­ners has an ambi­tious goal of invest­ing in com­pa­nies that deliv­er top-tier returns while also yield­ing envi­ron­men­tal and social ben­e­fits. From a clean tech per­spec­tive – with Tes­la, Solar City and Off-Grid Elec­tric among your invest­ments – are you feel­ing bull­ish today about achiev­ing these dual objec­tives and do they require more patience than is typ­i­cal for a VC firm?

Nan­cy Pfund: DBL’s mis­sion of invest­ing for both finan­cial and social returns is get­ting more rel­e­vant every day. Investors from pen­sion funds to endow­ments to fam­i­ly offices, foun­da­tions and strate­gics increas­ing­ly have sus­tain­abil­i­ty front and cen­ter in terms of their areas of focus. DBL has been a huge ben­e­fi­cia­ry of this trend, and its invest­ments are help­ing to show the world that now is the time to cre­ate the 21st Century’s icon­ic cor­po­ra­tions designed with 21st cen­tu­ry needs like cli­mate change in mind.

In our asset class, ven­ture cap­i­tal, patience is required no mat­ter what the sec­tor. Tak­ing on incum­bents doesn’t hap­pen smooth­ly or overnight. While clean ener­gy invest­ing has its share of volatil­i­ty – the ‘solar coast­er’ as one exam­ple – the progress we are mak­ing is unde­ni­able as we move toward high­er and high­er pen­e­tra­tion of renew­ables, EVs, effi­cient build­ings and, now, ener­gy stor­age. While the state by state reg­u­la­to­ry struc­ture in the Unit­ed States is an expen­sive attribute with which com­pa­nies in this space have to con­tend, the reward is that when progress is made, the pub­lic pays atten­tion and the sto­ries of these pio­neers become embed­ded in a larg­er swath of our social fab­ric than just a new app com­pa­ny can usu­al­ly achieve. This makes for out­sized return poten­tial, both in terms of investors and soci­ety as a whole.

C: You have pre­dict­ed a trans­for­ma­tion in the ener­gy world in the next decade that will change entire indus­tries, includ­ing elec­tric pow­er and trans­porta­tion. Why are you con­fi­dent about this trans­for­ma­tion mov­ing forward?

NP: The ener­gy trans­for­ma­tion is dri­ven both by attrac­tive cost/​performance curves and grow­ing con­sumer aware­ness and demand. It is this com­bi­na­tion that makes it so unstop­pable. No longer do con­sumers need to sac­ri­fice per­for­mance for green cre­den­tials, and increas­ing­ly they not only don’t need to pay more, they may pay less. Going for­ward, the oppor­tu­ni­ty will grow to store your pow­er from your solar pan­els to use at night or as back­up, charge your car accord­ing to the cheap­est rates with the push of a but­ton, and enjoy aes­thet­ic appeal in design from your roof to your win­dows to your garage: all of this taps into what con­sumers want today. Just as we have enjoyed rad­i­cal changes in how we take pho­tos, send emails or texts, make phone calls, lis­ten to music, and share sto­ries, pho­tos and infor­ma­tion with one anoth­er of the past decade, we are now poised to enjoy these new ben­e­fits in our ener­gy lives. Like Rumpelstilskin’s 100 year old slum­ber, it’s time to wake up! Along the way, we can re-invig­o­rate qual­i­ty job cre­ation and man­u­fac­tur­ing, cre­at­ing jobs that are acces­si­ble to a wide vari­ety of Americans.

C: I’m espe­cial­ly intrigued by DBL Partner’s recent $10.5 mil­lion invest­ment in Off-Grid Elec­tric, an off-grid solar com­pa­ny that is entire­ly focused on Africa. This is DBL’s first invest­ment in Africa. Why Africa and why now, and how did lessons learned from your domes­tic clean ener­gy invest­ments inform this investment?

NP: Our invest­ment in Off-Grid Elec­tric (OGE) is a log­i­cal pro­gres­sion of both DBL’s mis­sion and our invest­ment focus. There are cur­rent­ly over 1.4 bil­lion peo­ple who live with­out elec­tric­i­ty, over 600 mil­lion are in sub-Saha­ran Africa. With­out fix­ing this elec­tric­i­ty gap, build­ing a mid­dle class and improv­ing qual­i­ty of life will remain off lim­its to regions of the world that are slat­ed for some of the high­est rates of pop­u­la­tion growth over the next gen­er­a­tion. In 2016, we sim­ply can’t sit by and let this hap­pen – we need col­lec­tive action and we need to extend the ben­e­fits of an entre­pre­neur­ial approach to regions that are now ready to launch. At the same time, in bring­ing elec­tric­i­ty to mil­lions of peo­ple, we don’t want to, and don’t have to repeat some of our 20th cen­tu­ry mod­els that no longer work. Costs of solar and stor­age and ener­gy effi­cien­cy devices are now in reach for many Africans, and can replace dirty and unre­li­able fos­sil based solu­tions. The wide­spread use of mobile phones in this area of the world also allows for fric­tion­less pay­ment mod­els, anoth­er leapfrog effect that allows Africa to define its own future and aug­ment its entre­pre­neur­ial pro­file. These are the rea­sons to use the lessons we have learned in U.S. clean ener­gy mar­kets and apply them to a new mar­ket like Africa: the return poten­tial is sig­nif­i­cant and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to shape a more pros­per­ous and healthy future makes for one of the high­est impact endeav­ors of our age.

To read the full inter­view, vis­it Forbes.