Funding the Future of Climate Tech

Dimitry Gershenson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Enduring Planet, a fintech platform that provides fast, flexible, and founder-friendly capital to climate entrepreneurs.  Dimitry has over a decade of experience across climate tech, operations, and impact investing.  

Learn more via the links below:

https://enduringplanet.com/

Imperfect Show Notes

While these notes are not perfect (AI translation is still improving), they give you the gist of the conversation. Enjoy!

My conversation with Dimitry Gershenson:

Morgan Bailey 0:02  

Hello, and welcome to the profit meets impact Podcast where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host, Morgan Bailey. And I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. All right, we're about to jump into a conversation with Dimitri Gershenson, who is the CEO and co founder of enduring planet, a FinTech platform that provides fast, flexible and founder friendly capital to climate entrepreneurs. Dimitri has over a decade of experience with climate tech operations and impact investing. Dimitri, stoked to have you on the show.

Dimitry Gershenson 0:43  

Thanks for having me.

Morgan Bailey 0:45  

So you have a really interesting background, you've done international work, you've worked at climate startups. And now you're in the investing space actually helping climate startups get their financing. I'd love to know, where did this journey begin for you?

Dimitry Gershenson 1:00  

I wonder how far back we should go. I think, look, I in all honesty, I think this journey really began for me, when I was in the Peace Corps in Latin America. I, you know, I had sort of focused my undergrad on environmental work. And just, I mean, for no better reason than I couldn't really figure out what else to do. And my brother had pursued a degree in Applied Ecology, and I was like, I'm at the same school, I, why not do the same degree, like, it's, I don't really know what I want to do with myself. And I think as part of that work, I started to get a sense of the sort of complex relationship that people had with planet. And also, through the, through that sort of experience, I started to learn about the deep inequity that we had around the world in terms of people's access to basic services, how that access to basic services, then translated to a relationship with the environment. And for me, it felt like the best place to understand that better was the Peace Corps. And so I ended up in Honduras in 2009, and kind of went from there.

Morgan Bailey 2:22  

All right. And from there, it seems that there's I'm guessing there's a little more story to it from there, but so you're there I love I love the equity piece. Because that I mean, I think that's really huge. Right? So, so talk to me a little bit like, how did you turn that? I mean, so for a lot of people, maybe they would go into maybe the nonprofit space or the charity space or like, so. So what informed you and how did you start out of all of those things? How did you start to hone in specifically on the climate.

Dimitry Gershenson 2:50  

So I, I ended up working in a community in the mountains of Honduras, where most of my work touched on either sustainable agriculture, access to, you know, electricity, in this case, typically provided through solar or rural hydro or other kind of similar, off grid energy sources. And also clean cooking, and all of those things kind of tie in to, to challenges around climate, whether they're drivers of emissions, or impacted by a changing climate over time. And in particular, the place that I lived is a big coffee sector. And coffee is probably one of the most impacted agricultural commodities by climate change. And so that's where I started to sort of get a sense. And, you know, I thought that Peace Corps, I thought that after leaving the Peace Corps, I would work on international development with this tie to sort of sustainability, clean energy. But that didn't last long.

Morgan Bailey 3:59  

Tell me Tell me about that.

Dimitry Gershenson 4:00  

Well, I, you know, initially my plan, I sort of, I got really into the development sector as a vehicle and a lever for driving change. And I, when I worked in the Peace Corps, I saw a lot of other institutions do development work. And pretty quickly, I realized that it was kind of a broken system. And there were a lot of like, terrible practices that were considered best in class. And I wanted to sort of understand how to do it better. And so I went to grad school at Berkeley, at the Energy and Resources Group I work with Dan came in there who's been, I think, at the forefront of like, sort of the intersection of climate sustainable development and energy. And I ended up in South Sudan, where I was working on a project together with a big Foundation, Humanity United and UC Berkeley, around a plan for sustainable development for South Sudan, which was at the time the newest country in the world. and sort of unfortunately for me, and really unfortunately for the people of South Sudan, there was a civil war, smack dab in the middle of my project. And so the whole thing like evaporated overnight, and I had to figure out how to save my graduate program, like my my personal experience a master's degree, I had to figure out how to save it on like a four month timeline, I basically had to find a new master's thesis overnight. And I ended up landing on this intersection of capital and clean energy in emerging markets, because for a variety of reasons, and that set me off on this, like, impact investing trajectory that I'm on now.

Morgan Bailey 5:40  

Wow, that's, that's why I mean, I resonate a lot with what you say, I mean, having worked in development sector out of grad school and throughout grad school. And, yeah, I mean, wanting to be a part of the change, but seeing like, the way the change has been implemented, is really ineffective. You know, I saw I saw structural racism and bias still within the development sector, which was really challenging. And it's ultimately how I decided and shifted, I think, I think there's a better way, which, you know, which I think my younger self would have been surprised about that better way, being business. But that's, in fact, I think, kind of what, you know, the levers that I saw, were going to be most effective making change and sounds like you kind of came to a similar conclusion yourself. And by some some interesting things like, you know, the civil war happening in Sudan, which ultimately, you know, pushed you into a different sector. So, talk to us about what was it like to make that transition? Or like what, you know, what kind of drew you into focusing more on the investment piece?

Dimitry Gershenson 6:42  

Yeah, I think, look, in the end, there's a lot of conversation and discussion we can have about sort of the role of business in driving societal outcomes, the role of government, the role of nonprofits, I think, the jury's still out on whether, like, capitalism is an even effective model for development, if you could say, I think for me, the decision was really driven by a few elements. One is that I don't think we're going to have, I don't think in my lifetime, we're going to see like a shift away from capitalism, which means that it's a system that's here to stay, and at least on the timescales that I'm operating under. And that means that like, if I want to make change, I need to sort of operate within that system. That was one, one sort of conclusion that I came to, to is that a lot of the other levers that are available, just didn't appeal to me, like I, I thought, maybe I'll work in the policy space. And then I actually worked on policy stuff. And I like couldn't deal with the pacing. I, at the time, I didn't think I could be an entrepreneur, because I didn't really have the resources. And and so I was like, Okay, well, capital seems like a really significant lever that can drive change across a lot of different areas. And there are lots of creative ways to exist in the capital landscape. That, to me didn't feel like traditional finance, which I like, wasn't really excited about. And I started to get a sense of these, like, sort of options for capital to be catalysts. And that got really exciting to me, because I was starting to get a sense of, okay, well, you know, you could put $1 in to build a solar plant over here, and you get, you know, whatever, one, one for one, or you can put $1 in to this vehicle where that dollar buys down risk for other investors and all sudden, you can unlock 10x the capital to do the same work. And that, to me was really interesting is that there's, like, flavors of capital can be really different. And if you combine them effectively, you can actually get better outcomes for everybody involved. And I hadn't really understood that before. And I think now that's, that's part of actually a drive like a pretty key element to our business model added during planet

Morgan Bailey 9:18  

so I'm appreciating the journey you've been on and kind of grounding in originally to sort of the science of it, and then for the travel and eventually bridging into the finance piece, which, you know, I can say from my own experience, this is probably been like one of the last pieces, you know, I you know, I went to grad school, I got a PhD in math or environmental engineering, which included a lot of math and my undergrad and physics have traveled the world done things like that. And I've been like, it took me a while I did everything I could to not think about the finance piece. And I think it's just now over the past few years. Like really diving into that. So like, you know, I'm kind of here yours for those, for those in the field of trying to use business for a force of good, where, you know, what advice do you have for people to really start to understand the power of finance or the role of finance, and helping solve things like climate change or solving equity?

Dimitry Gershenson 10:18  

Look, I think when, when you exist in a capitalist system, nothing happens without capital. Right? And so then the question becomes, how can capital address the needs of diverse populations in a way that I think over time reinforces what I think we know now as sort of, like, sustainable or social good outcomes, right. And I think oftentimes, people think of a finance or, or even money in very, like discrete. And I would often say, like conservative terms, like people, you know, there's like a box that people draw, they're like, this is this is what it means to be in finance, this is what it means to be an investor, right? Like, this is what it means to be a philanthropist. And I think one of the things that's probably the biggest lesson for me over over the last decade is that I think all of those boundaries are pretty arbitrary. And if you are able to build a community of folks who creatively think about capital and social impact contexts, you can do pretty incredible things to drive outcomes that in the past, people would have thought were either impossible, or you know, on bankable or commercially non viable or whatever, whatever it is, I also think that like, it is important to remember that capital and impact finance or whatever, like has limitations. And there, you can't solve every problem with with like, investment dollars, right? Like there, there will always be cases where either a government entity or a charitable entity needs to do the work. And that's okay. And like, those things should not be conflated. And I think sometimes people attempt to use commercial dollars to drive outcomes that shouldn't be driven with commercial dollars, and vice versa. And so people need to sort of like, do their homework and get creative. And yeah, maybe I'll stop there.

Morgan Bailey 12:47  

Yeah. Well, I mean, going back the adage, like, money doesn't solve all problems, or helps. And ultimately, climate change. I mean, the funding that is, is really important. However, that's, it's a piece, it's a piece of the puzzle, you can't just throw money at everything.

Dimitry Gershenson 13:03  

I mean, what's funny about climate change is that in some ways, we do just need to throw money at it and like dramatically more money at it. I think you and I talked about this, in the prep, like, climate change of the 5 trillion a year problem, if we're lucky. We're not even spending a trillion a year as a as like a global community on this problem. And, yes, like, we need innovation in the finance system, to support all the different use cases. But in some ways, we just need more money, we just need like 5x More money thrown at this problem. Because it is an issue of urgency. And so every year, we wait to invest more, because whatever bullshit reason people give for not putting their money where we need it to go. Every year is is like a year wasted. And carbon has a time value to it. Carbon emitted today is worth way more than carbon emitted in 50 years. And so if, if we're not putting the money in today, and we wait till 2030, like

it might be too late. At least for the scenarios that people sort of say are like, manageable, two degrees C is manageable.

Morgan Bailey 14:27  

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is I mean, that the timeline is is a little frightening. And I think you You're right on the investment piece. I mean, I think this is the climate is high, highly underfunded. yet but I feel like something that's that's taking shape over the past few years, is for there actually to be greater returns for climate tech. And obviously, which I think individuals such as yourself are starting to enter this industry because you not only see that it's good for the planet, but it's also a way that to generate revenue which in turn can generate more innovation. So do you do you see that continuing? Do you see the climate tech industry? Just becoming a larger sector and a more profitable sector?

Dimitry Gershenson 15:12  

Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's, I don't like I don't think it's avoidable. The the new climate economy is coming, whether we like it or not, right, like, the world is on fire. And it's going to change. And it's already I mean, it's already happening, right, like consumer preferences around making purchasing decisions with climate in mind, have changed dramatically. And just even the last five years, government efforts to sponsor this transition between the IRA, the Europe's Green New Deal, I mean, like, it's just, it's like, orders of magnitude more than we had in the past. It's still not enough. But I mean, the US alone is going to put $80 billion a year in tax credits into the sector over the next decade. That's, that's not an insignificant amount of money. And if you look at other indicators of growth in the space, I mean, venture investing in climate is probably the most resilient element of the entire venture economy today. And, you know, everyone from smaller financial institutions to major banks are making commitments for capital deployed and climate. Again, I think like, there's this constant need to remember that, while it's all good, that it's growing and progressing, it is not enough, and we need to do more. And I think that people need to take this fear and panic about not doing enough and the timescales on which we need to operate. And take that and channel it into like, very aggressive action. Right? Like, and look, I don't, I don't operate under the illusion that engineering planet is going to fix the $4 trillion financing gap, like, obviously not there. There are no financial institutions that operate on that kind of scale, right. But maybe, you know, if we put a billion dollars to work over the next five years, other folks will be similarly inspired. other institutional investors will see the work they were doing and will, will replicate it, like the need is so big, just corporate credit, which is what we do we provide credit to businesses. It's like a, I don't know, half trillion to three quarters of a trillion dollars a year problem and climate. Like there could be 700 firms, like during planet doing a billion dollars of lending a year in climate. And we would just hit the target.

Morgan Bailey 17:59  

You know, I want to back up for a second. You You mentioned, you talked about how, like, I guess, maybe the individual how individuals can play a role, right. And I think when it comes to financing investments, that's something where a lot of people struggle, they see it as Okay, either corporations are dealing with this, or policy. And and I know for myself, it's been a journey to think, Okay, well, where's my where's my money going? Where's my money invested? Like, what do I do as an individual? But I'd be curious to hear from you, right? Like, what, as an individual, how should people be making sense of the climate crisis and their role their involvement in the solution?

Dimitry Gershenson 18:44  

So look, I think it is important to remember, sort of too often are largely conflicting notions. On the one hand, individual consumers and individuals like us are not generally responsible for the climate crisis. It is like a product of industrial and corporate activity. We are small contributors in terms of our residential emissions in terms of, you know, the car, we drive, in terms of the appliances we buy, those are all important. But like in the grand scheme of things, those are small slivers of like emissions profile of the global economy. But how we consume and where we consume, that then translates to bigger changes. And so, you know, for example, if we're going to stick to this, like money, question, right. So what can individuals do about their money that will change the world? One is where do you bank so do you keep your your personal assets at a bank that invests in fossil fuels? And if the answer is yes, move on. Do you keep your retirement account with a financial institution that is allocating that money to the oil sector? If you do, move it. There's groups like carbon collective, where you can get a 401 K or an IRA that have no climate like that. They're investing in the new climate economy. So I think, you know, where how do you vote? In terms of where the government directs their money? Are you supporting grow climate candidates that are then going to make investment decisions for the government to support a new climate economy? And if the answer is yes, then great if not, like, reevaluate, because the people that you're putting into power are killing us. So I think like luck, in the end, taking climate action isn't so much like, oh, go buy an Eevee. And like, get a heat pump, and you're done. I think all of us across everything that we do need to apply a climate lens and say, Hey, can I have an impact here on the trajectory of the planet, whether it's small or big? And is it worth it? And sometimes, like, the answer is no, you know, like, I have a gas natural gas water heater at home. And I can't tell you how many times I've been, I've been pitched to switch to an electric heat pump. From an emissions standpoint, and from a cost standpoint, it like makes zero sense for me, because it has such a small delta and the emissions and it has literally no cost benefit. And so I haven't made the choice. And that's okay. Like, that doesn't make me a bad person. It's fine. Everybody gets me to make personal choices, but across much of my life, if I have the option to choose a climate friendly alternative, I do. Yeah. And that's, that's like the best you could ask.

Morgan Bailey 21:58  

You can and it's a process and I talked about this in a previous podcast, like, it's not something you do overnight. And it takes learning, it takes education. I mean, it took me it took me a year to figure out how to adjust my investments, my banking, and I'm still figuring that out. Because there are a lot, it's a confusing landscape, you know, who's investing in fossil fuels, who's investing in private prisons, like, we're not all, we don't all have this investment experience. And oftentimes, it's hard to know where to turn to get that. So I think this being patient, but but kind of chipping away at it bit by bit. And increasing your awareness allows you to start to make better and better decisions such as years down the road. When it comes to buying a water heater, something you're like, I've thought through that. I don't need to research that again, I can figure I can figure out what that looks like. Or oh, I'm, I'm shifting my 401k. I now know what questions to ask. But it takes time, but it's bit by bit. But I want to, I want to fast forward now. And I want to jump into enduring planet. And the first thing I want to ask is, how did you start in investment firm, right like that, that to me, I'm like, wow, I don't even know where I would start with that. That sounds like a daunting task.

Dimitry Gershenson 23:14  

You know, I would say it's totally chance. So I had left Facebook at the start of 2020. I joined this group called during ventures, which mostly doesn't do climate work. It's like a, it's effectively a holding company that buys portfolios of small, medium sized businesses. And I joined as an operating partner to do some m&a and run a portfolio company in the rural internet space that had some connections to my previous work at Facebook. I mean, I also just like, I needed a job at the time. And it was it's a firm run by my friends. And I was like, this is cool, I get to learn a ton and I can apply the skills that I learned previously. And in parallel to that we we sort of launched a little venture studio at at AV and incubated our first startup, which just by chance ended up being a climate business is actually backed by lower carbon. I still sit on the board. It's a company called Eco Safi also in emerging markets. Just kind of fun. And, you know, fast forward a year, we brought on a seasoned telco exec to run the company I was running, and I stepped out and had to figure out what to do next. And fortunately for me, the enduring ventures team said, Look, we really like working with you. If you want to start a startup, we can back you out of the venture studio. And I just signed a mortgage. I've got a five year old in a normal situation, I would have never started a venture backed startup because usually You can't like take comp, you have to eat ramen for a while, like, I can't do that with a kid and a mortgage. But the venture studio model presented me the opportunity to build a business, like with less sort of personal stake, but still very much a personal stake. And and so that was like, that was the impetus. That was the push to build something new. And then for me, the question was, well, if I'm going to do it, and I'm going to only do it in climate, because that's what I want to spend the rest of my life working on. What is that where what is a business that I think I can build that will reach venture scale, and have the kind of impact that I want?

Morgan Bailey 25:45  

Amazing. And, you know, I love the I love the the chance piece of it, you know, and just reflecting also on you know, your your master's thesis, just, you know how often chance plays a role. But you showed up for it, and you opened up to it, and some now now enduring planet exists. So talk to us a little bit about what doesn't during planet do and how does it help people.

Dimitry Gershenson 26:10  

So enduring planet is a we're a FinTech lender. So we provide capital to, to climate businesses. And we were sort of organized around the principle that climate entrepreneurs should have the resources that they need to save all of us from ourselves. And whether those resources come from during planted or not, we want to play a role in helping founders entrepreneurs get that capital. And today, we offer two products, both of which are entirely non dilutive. So there's no like warrants for equity participation of any kind. The first is a revenue based financing instrument, where we are effectively providing you an investment in exchange for a portion of your future revenue. So you could sort of like say, it's like factoring or royalty payments are lots of different names for this, but we give you money, and you give us a percentage of your future revenue for a fixed period of time. That's our revenue based financing instrument. And then we also launched a new product in October, which is now sort of dominating our pipeline, which is, we call it the climate grant advance, where we provide companies working capital against state or federal grant funds. And maybe to provide just a little bit more context there. When you as a, as an entrepreneur, or as a business, when you when funding grant funding from a state or federal agency in the climate space, almost always, it is done on a trailing basis where you have to like, spend money and then you get reimbursed by the government. And often those timelines are very slow. And so you might win a grant from the Department of Energy, and you won't see them the cash for six months. Not Not all the cash, like just the first reimbursement. And that's a really difficult dynamic for most companies to meet. And there's not a lot of options for how they can support that investment so that they can then get paid back through the grant. And so we provide that option.

Morgan Bailey 28:21  

Wow, sir. And love these two novel approaches. And I kind of want to dig into a little bit the revenue based financing, right, which is different than sort of an equity model, which is, so talk us a little bit through like, why did why did you go with that? What's the difference between the equity model and a revenue base model?

Dimitry Gershenson 28:41  

So I think there are a lot of perspectives on why revenue based financing might be better or worse than different types of capital? For me, there were a few considerations of why that was the first product that we started, right. So one, I think it's really difficult to build a venture bankable startup, doing equity investments, you might as well start a venture fund. And I didn't really want to start a venture fund to I think the economics and sort of like just the model of investing in equity has a very different feedback loop and a very different incentive structure. You You're sort of incentivized to make outside like bets that have outsized returns, where you expect 90 plus percent of them to fail. And you don't really know, until, like, 10 years later, and, and, you know, I'm like, I'm not saying I'll never be a VC. But right now, that doesn't really appeal to me. Like I want more immediate feedback. And so if you look at like, if you're going to build a FinTech lending business, there are also certain products that lend themselves that Letter to automation. You know, and some of the like financial technology innovation that has happened over the last decade. And revenue based financing is, in many ways, like almost a perfect product, because it is based on historical financial data. There's a lot that you can do to automate underwriting. It is a product that gives you very immediate, like clarity on how your loan is performing, because you get paid every month. And it, I think, has a very founder friendly structure, because you pay to sort of proportional to your performance in the preceding month. And so if you have a really good month, you pay a little more, if you have a really bad month, you pay less. And that adjustment of sort of payment schedule, I think is much, much better for an entrepreneur, than having a fixed principal and interest payment that a bank might give you, where if one day, you have a bad month, and you can't make your payment, like they could take your IP, they could, you know, like destroy your credit. There's all these things that traditional financing, like there's covenants and protections for risk. And, and I think that that can make the lives of entrepreneurs very difficult. And so we sort of gravitated towards this product. And I think similarly, the grant advance, it kind of addresses some of the same things, because we only get paid when they get paid by the government. And so there aren't these contexts where you know, the timeline slips or something goes wrong or whatever. And then we ended up like, showing up with a crowbar and like threatening to break your knees like, That's not. That's not the kind of Lent that's not the kind of business I want to run. I want us to support entrepreneurs through thick and through thin. And these products enable us to do that while also generating, I would say appropriate returns for our investors.

Morgan Bailey 31:52  

Awesome. Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. And yeah, try to imagine you running after somebody is a crowbar and possible, I say probably not likely. So okay, now, let's talk about the process a little bit. Right. So let's say there is someone interested, what does that process look like? So one has a climate tech startup, they're saying, hey, you know, we're kind of we've done some some financing already. We're looking to build up our cash flow a little bit. So how does that what does that process look like?

Dimitry Gershenson 32:25  

Yeah, so if you run a startup, or a small or medium sized business and climate and we don't, we don't just back venture back couple of companies like we are, we work with small businesses, medium sized businesses, startups, it doesn't really matter, right? If if our products are a fit for your needs, and one of the things that I would say is that if you go to our website, you can actually look at the terms for how we invest, you can pull a template term sheet right now without ever apply. And there's pretty much any of your questions around what the product will look like can be answered without you applying. And that's really important to us, we care deeply about being transparent. So let's say you look, you decide that this product that works for you, you apply, our application takes about 10 minutes, as part of that application, you connect your banking and accounting systems to our API through our API to our, to our back end systems. And then we generally make a preliminary underwriting decision and issue a term sheet within a week. And that might require one quick call to validate some questions. And then once the term sheet goes out, and assigned if a company, you know, if they sign, then we proceed through a deeper diligence process usually takes one two, maybe three calls at most, if the business is super complicated. And then we find within a month, so it's pretty fast, really simple. There's, we don't negotiate legal. So like, either like the terms or you don't, we obviously negotiate pricing. So lots of room. But one of the things that often happens with these types of transactions in a traditional sense is that a bank will send you 600 pages of legal documents, and then you send it to your lawyers, and then they do revisions, and then you spend three months going back and forth over some terms. And you're going to spend, I don't know $100,000 on legal. So we don't do that. Like everything is simple. Everything is fast. It is what it is. There's no surprises. There's no gotchas. You see everything before you start. And we think that model is better.

Morgan Bailey 34:40  

And, you know, I'm curious, like from feedback from the companies you work with, like how has this process been for them?

Dimitry Gershenson 34:48  

People seem to like it. I mean, we're, we're almost fully deployed on our first fund. Right on schedule. We are in the process of closing on a first Realty that has about 20 times the size, we have a ton of demand. And, you know, from at least anecdotally, we don't, we don't really like have a review system. We don't like, I don't know, Net Promoter Score, whatever. But we try to publish a case study on every deal we do. And typically our founders include a quote, and folks seem to like us, I mean, you know, we're also constantly changing. So as, as people, you know, give us feedback on our product, or the process or the application flow or whatever, we just, we just adjust in real time, I think it's a really important part of serving a customer bases this diverse is that you kind of have to be flexible, and, and iterate as you go.

Morgan Bailey 35:46  

So looking ahead, I'm curious, if you look ahead to the future, like what what is success for enduring planet looked like? Like, what would be that like? Yes, this, this feels really good.

Dimitry Gershenson 36:01  

I mean, honestly, it feels really good right now.

Morgan Bailey 36:05  

I think positive sign? Yeah, I

Dimitry Gershenson 36:06  

think if even we just do what we've done so far, we've helped, you know, 2020 ish teams, like, get work really important work done. And I'm pretty proud of that. I would love to put a billion dollars to work in our first five years, like, that's the number that we sort of talked about a lot. It feels feels big enough, but not out of the scope of of possibility. I mean, the demand is insane. And there's just so much opportunity to get creative with with capital in this market. And, and so I think, for us, as long as the founders we interact with come away feeling like we were helpful, whether it's with our money or our connections or our advice, then I feel pretty good about that. And I think that in the end, like, even if we don't deploy that much money, but we help people raise some large quantity of money through our network that feels pretty good to in the end, it doesn't matter where the money comes from, it matters that we solve the problem.

Morgan Bailey 37:21  

Yeah, absolutely. So and I'm imagining that like, for these companies being able to come to, to a company such as enduring planet who has a mission to support climate, I imagine that has to have a very different feel than going to a traditional lender.

Dimitry Gershenson 37:39  

Can you say that again?

Morgan Bailey 37:44  

Yeah. I mean, I'm just imagining being a being a startup coming to someone who actually has a similar mission. Like that. That's got it. That's got to feel good.

Dimitry Gershenson 37:53  

Yeah, yeah. That? Totally, I mean, look, I think being value aligned with your capital provider, I think is it's something that is important to a lot of entrepreneurs. In particular, in climate, like, I think people generally would rather take money, all other things being equal from someone who gives a shit. Right? I think that's, that's, that's, that's true. I think. And we, in our experience, like even when our pricing might be slightly higher than on alternative, like people choose to work with us, because we care. And to some degree, because, you know, part of part of the outcome of us caring so much about the space is that we've built a pretty incredible community of partners, to support companies and are on our radar with other things. So we share deal flow with close to 300, other investors, VCs, Angel syndicates, providers of inventory, finance, PIO, finance, you name it, like folks who provide complimentary capital to ours. We have over 50 partners now that provide all sorts of services, to climate startups at discounts. And so like, I think, and that's, that's enabled by the fact that we care. And we exist in this ecosystem, and we show up as folks who care. And, and I think that matters a lot. I think in the end, you know, it's interesting, because I have this discussion a lot with investors. People are like, Oh, well, what's your sort of competitive advantage long term? Right? Is it proprietary underwriting? Is it some unique data set? Is it better pricing like market entry, would it what is right? And sure, I think a lot of those things play a role, but in the end, it's your brand. Yeah. Like if people know that you are a good actor who is there for them, and is not trying to extract the most possible value that you can People will want to work. Yeah, that'd be That's naive. But

Morgan Bailey 40:06  

I mean that no, I think that I think that rings true. You know, and it values the relationship, you know, its values, the integrity, the authenticity, and ultimately trust in people rather spend money somewhere where they have trust. So,

Dimitry Gershenson 40:20  

especially right now, right? Yeah. Especially right

Morgan Bailey 40:23  

now. So if people want to learn more about enduring planet are connected to you, how can they do so?

Dimitry Gershenson 40:33  

Well, they can send me an email at Dimitri D i m i t ry, at enduring planet.com. Or they can just go to enduring planet.com and apply or they can hit our contact button, which also goes to me and my team. We're active on social, we've got a Twitter page and a LinkedIn page and any of those avenues they end up generally leading to me on my team, so yeah, I mean, look, we're we're, we're always looking for companies to support. We're always looking for folks who interact with a lot of entrepreneurs in the space who might want to help us and send us deal flow. And we actually have a Scout program where we will compensate people for referrals that translate to deals. We're always looking for CO investors, like, I think, for us community is a really core part of what we do. And so if you want to be part of our community, let me know.

Morgan Bailey 41:32  

Dimitri, thanks so much. Appreciate this conversation. Also, just appreciate your leadership out there on this topic.

Dimitry Gershenson 41:38  

Thanks so much, Morgan. I really, this was great.

Morgan Bailey 41:42  

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Prophet meets impact podcast. If you enjoy this experience. Please subscribe wherever you find your podcasts and leave a positive review. You can also find out more about the podcast at www.profitmeetsimpact.com