💡Know your audience—and other climate story tips from Leonardo Banchik

With experience at all points of the climate compass—researcher, founder, consultant, investor—Banchik has a unique lens into climate comms.

Leonardo Banchik has been interested in climate since childhood. He was an avid science fiction reader as a kid. Stories and books from authors like Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick, JG Ballard and Carl Sagan had him thinking about how humans might live on other planets or how technology can enable us to explore the universe. But he describes walking the streets of Las Vegas and seeing the bright lights, feeling the blast of air conditioning from hotels during the hot summer months—“In summer, they would leave casino doors open to entice people off the street,” he recalls—and it shifted his focus from space to climate tech. 

"You don't need to be an expert to look around Las Vegas and recognize it’s been on an unsustainable path," Banchik said.

He remembers visiting the EIA.gov website and learning that Las Vegas uses a lot of coal and natural gas. Lake Mead was drying up, and greywater recycling was still nascent. He was overwhelmed by the feeling—There’s got to be a better way. So when he enrolled as a freshman at UNLV, he quickly became one of the youngest students to be involved in solar research on campus. 

“That set the tone for me for the rest of my life,” he says. “I decided I want to work in technology, and I want to work on climate."

Since then, Banchik has worked as a researcher, consultant, and climate tech investor. Today, he’s a Director at Voyager, an early-stage climate tech venture fund. His long history with and multifaceted experience in the climate tech space help influence how he selects and supports early-stage companies. 

Lake Mead via ABC News

You credit your time at McKinsey partly putting you on the path to climate tech investing. How did you make the leap?

What I got excited about at McKinsey was the new technologies that we can bring to market. Yes, solar and wind are exciting and we need a lot more of them, but that's not necessarily the role of venture. That's the world of infrastructure development and project finance. At McKinsey, I advised many clients who were thinking about where to allocate capital to new technologies to make a difference. That's where I developed the investor toolkit, how to perform rigorous due diligence, how to meet and work with management teams, develop trust to learn where they are in terms of commercialization, technical progress, etc.

I really liked that function. I got to learn about new technologies and assess the risks. There will always be risks in early and late-stage ventures but which ones are underwritable, and which ones are not? I got to exercise the part of my brain that is an engineer and enjoys the details, but I also got to exercise the extrovert in me who likes meeting new people, discussing ideas, and thinking about business models. McKinsey was the place where I was able to marry the engineering and the business mindset. 

You have a holistic view of climate change, working on solutions as an engineer, consultant, and now investor. How did your experience in those roles contribute to that view?

I'm not an OG like other investors in my space, some people were investing in the CleanTech 1.0 boom-bust. I was witnessing it, living it, and reading about these technologies coming out of the labs. I try to, on the one hand, keep that historical context as a guide, and on the other hand, I try to keep an open mind to new technologies that may be bucking that trend.

Take hydrogen for instance: I've seen multiple hydrogen hype cycles. In 2010, when I was working at Oak Ridge, people were talking about using hydrogen for passenger vehicles. Back then, we knew about the well-to-wheel efficiencies and that compared to battery electric, they weren't as strong. A lot of things ended up playing out in favor of EVs. So thinking about what didn't materialize today, which was promised in the past, helps guide my investing. 

At the same time, I’m trying to keep an open mind. It doesn't mean that hydrogen is not important at all, there are a lot of important needs for hydrogen. Geologic hydrogen and sustainable aviation are pretty cool areas where smart folks have been investing capital.

I've been fortunate to have exposure to different worlds – I've been a researcher in the lab, I've been a founder, I've been an operator, I've been a consultant, I've been in government at the DOE. As an engineer by background and with the business thinking from McKinsey, I try to bring all of these things to bear when making investment decisions and thinking about storytelling. If you're pitching something that is supposed to buck a trend that I've seen over the past 10, 15 years, I'll ask, "Why now - what's different now?"

Speaking of storytelling – how are you involved in helping your portfolio companies tell their stories? How do you help them navigate communicating important, but often technical solutions?

Knowing your audience and what they care about, and when to go into a lot of detail is a key early learning that I had at McKinsey and during my PhD. It's absolutely critical. When I first started at McKinsey, I sometimes would go into a little more detail than was needed. It was just a function of coming from the Ph.D. I had to learn pretty quickly that executive-level comms are crucial. Sometimes it’s best to just put all the details in the appendix.

Both the qualitative and quantitative sides are important in storytelling. On the quantitative side, entrepreneurs need to think through "What do my slides look like?.” On the quantitative side, entrepreneurs need to convey their superior unit economics vs. the status quo and their competitive edge.

When you're working with a very technical portfolio company, are you thinking about how you can tell that story to other stakeholders, like a news outlet?

I spend a bit of time with startups telling stories to customers and future investors. I dig in on my portfolio companies and help them reframe the story for their next series of raises. Sometimes I don't start with a PowerPoint - another trick that I learned from McKinsey is that you can start with a Word document so as not to get distracted by the visuals. I ask, “What's the high-level story that I can tell my grandmother in 10 bullets?” I find that it can be quite clarifying. I think it's important for investors because you want to make sure that they don't pass at the deck. You want to get them involved and interested.

You recently announced your move from Global Founders Capital to Voyager. What inspired you to make the move and what are you going to be focusing on in the new role?

GFC was an incredible place to work after McKinsey. I loved what I did there, and I’m very proud of the portfolio we built, but ultimately I felt that I wanted to join a climate-specific fund rather than a generalist fund. Climate is the only thing that I've worked on throughout my career. I could see that Sierra Peterson and Sarah Sclarsic view this as their life's work and they've been focused on climate for their whole careers as well. I saw an opportunity to come in and add value to the organization and I’m glad to have joined.

Image via Voyager Ventures

We’d love to hear more about how you think about climate solutions. You’ve talked about a “circus tent” approach—can you explain what you mean by that?

I think there's room for a lot of different technologies. It doesn't mean that there's room for everything. 

Some folks disagree and say, "We have all the technologies we need, we just need to deploy them." The reason I disagree is that as fast as mature technologies like solar and wind are being deployed, it's still difficult for us to ramp them up fast enough to change the way we live entirely within the next five to ten years. We have a lot of work to do both on the greenhouse gas reduction side and the removal side, and I think that we should be exploring new technologies to address both.

You’ve written about some climate communicators you admire like Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates. What do you think makes them so compelling as communicators, and then what inspiration do you draw from both of them? 

Bill used a lot of his capital and cachet to make climate exciting. He started Breakthrough Energy Ventures with a lot of very talented people around him and he's involved in other climate avenues that I respect him for. For early-stage investors like me, it's very important to have later-stage investors who can come in and continue to fund the startups that have promising technology. Folks like Bill are helping some of those growth equity funds get comfortable with these risks by speaking about how needed these technologies are.

Greta is the voice of the newer generation saying, "Enough talk, too much, blah, blah, blah. Let's actually do something."

She has been able to cut through a lot of noise. I partly credit her activism with how seriously the global community is taking decarbonization at the moment. Nobody wanted to talk about climate for 10 years after the CleanTech 1.0 bust, but I think folks like Bill and Greta and many others are responsible for helping put the spotlight back on the space.

Greta Thunberg via BBC news.

There is a lot of talent flooding into this space right now. Since 2019, the “green jobs” hiring rate has eclipsed that of the overall global hiring rate each year. Beyond the influence of people like Thunberg and Gates, what are some reasons for that increase?

I think people want to work on something meaningful. Perhaps helping improve search algorithms or optimizing somebody's social media feed has become less exciting. I think what got me into climate many years ago is motivating newer generations - wanting to tackle humanity's most important problems of water, food, and energy, and how we get them sustainably. 

A lot of talent has come in during the last five years, and we need a lot more. Both on the business side but also in policy across the U.S. and other regions. I believe we take this fairly seriously here in the US and Europe, but there are other regions where we still need to step up and move away from coal and decarbonize. 

What in the space is encouraging to you? Are there any technology trends in the climate investment space that are particularly exciting to you?

Green chemicals such as green ammonia, hydrogen, and carbon black production via methane pyrolysis, critical minerals, nuclear (mostly fission), applications of AI in climate, methane reduction and removal, and industrial decarbonization are all interesting and areas we’re currently looking into.  

(Water) Cooler Talk

🔢 Data-Driven Comms
One of the conversations happening a lot in client comms is about shifting the narrative away from “doomerism” and toward a more hopeful message. What exactly should that message be? John Marshall, a marketing exec focused on generating demand for climate policy through his nonprofit Potential Energy, is looking at the data to find out. He has analyzed some three billion climate-related ads, all of which have run within the last for years. “I can tell you what works and what doesn’t work,” he told The Washington Post. What doesn’t work: Words like “mandate,” “ban” and “phaseout.” What does: Messages about protecting the planet for the next generation. 

🙅 The New Denial
As climate comms are evolving, disinformation campaigns are, too. Research from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) revealed climate denial is changing shape online and getting around climate disinformation filters. Rather than out-and-out denial, new campaigns on YouTube and elsewhere deny the benefits of clean energy and/or attack clean energy policies and proponents. This new climate denial has doubled since 2018, and the messaging appears to be having an impact on teens in the US and UK, according to subsequent surveys.

📣A Message to Climate Marketers
2024 is the year for climate comms, writes Mitali Mukherjee in op-ed for The Drum. Mukherjee is the director for journalist programs at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. With the warmest year on record behind us, and extreme weather already kicking off 2024, the need for companies to address climate change is urgent. For comms, she says, that means three things: 1) Let science lead, 2) think in terms of investor-speak, not activism, and 3) be solution-oriented—and optimistic where possible.