Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change - Pioneering Impact Investor - Ep89: Ion Yadigaroglu

Pioneering Impact Investor - Ep89: Ion Yadigaroglu

06/07/22 • 63 min

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Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Ion Yadigaroglu has been Managing Partner at Capricorn Investment Group since 2004, and is an early investor in iconic technology companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, QuantumScape and Saildrone. Capricorn was born from the desire to demonstrate the huge investment potential that resides in breakthrough commercial solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, and as such is one of the original impact investors.

Prior to Capricorn, Ion was Director of Business Development (M&A) with Koch Industries, executing a range of acquisitions and investments, and a Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Bivio, a software startup in Colorado, and an Analyst at Olsen & Associates, a quantitative forex trader.

Ion was a research fellow at Columbia University and holds a master’s in physics from ETH Zürich in Switzerland and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Stanford University. Ion serves on the boards of Twelve and Capricorn, and was a founding member in 2007 of GIIN, the Global Impact Investor Network, and is a Director of non-profits Ceres and MethaneSat.

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Germany's Secretary of State for the Energiewende - Ep88: Patrick Graichen

Patrick Graichen is a State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. He has held this post since 15 December 2021 and is responsible for energy and climate policy.

From 2012, Graichen was instrumental in setting up the think tank Agora Energiewende, taking on the roles of Executive Director and Managing Director from 2014 until his move to the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

He began his career in public service at the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, first as an officer in the Division for International Climate Protection, then as Personal Assistant to a State Secretary, and subsequently as Head of Division for Climate and Energy Policy. During this time, he played a leading role in negotiating the economic instruments of the Kyoto Protocol, the Federal Government's 2007 Integrated Energy and Climate Programme, the EU's 2008 Climate and Energy Package, and legislative procedures in the field of energy law.

Patrick Graichen studied Political Science and Economics in Heidelberg and Cambridge, UK, before going on to earn his doctorate at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Environmental Economics at the University of Heidelberg.

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From Red Dwarf to Fully Charged Media Giant - Ep90: Robert Llewellyn

Robert Llewellyn is the joint CEO of the Fully Charged Show.

Robert Llewellyn is most commonly known for playing the role of Kryten for 30 years in the BBC hit series Red Dwarf. He hosted the Channel 4 series Scrapheap Challenge for 10 years, along with 8 series of How Do They Do It for Channel 5.

More recently he has taken his career to YouTube with The Fully Charged Show, the series has over 870,000 subscribers and now receives an average of 4 million views a month.

On the Fully Charged Show Llewellyn and his co-hosts investigate the rapid development of electric vehicle technology and anything from solar panels to alternative energy sources.

He is the author of seven fiction and eight non-fiction books, Llewellyn, who is of Anglo-Welsh ancestry, learnt to drive at age 11 (having been taught by his older brother in a go-kart); formerly a "petrol-head", he is now a widely acknowledged electric car and renewable energy/clean tech advocate and frequently presents talks on the subject.