Christian Hernandez: Impact through the urban environment
This week, our TTI Interview Series covers our member Christian Hernandez Gallardo. Christian is a technologist and experienced venture capitalist. He held leadership roles through the scale-up phase of some of the world’s largest technology companies, notably as head of international business development at Facebook and head of new markets at Google.
In this interview, Christian provides an insight into urban environments, cement and concrete use, and the potential of carbon taxing and gigacorns. He calls for "all hands on deck" to jointly address the climate challenge.
The urban environment and impact
Christian, tell us about your work and how it intersects with the impact space.
We recently unveiled 2150 a European €200m VC fund that backs technologies that help make our urban environment more efficient, resilient and sustainable. Sectorially, the opportunity for both impact and profit in the urban environment is huge. Construction alone accounts for 13% of the world’s GDP and yet the industry is the most laggard in terms of technology adoption, surpassed only by agriculture.
Our thesis focuses across the “urban stack” – from the infrastructure that enables the city by supporting, powering, and connecting it; the methods, materials and systems we employ to build cities; to how we operate urban environments, and ultimately how we experience life and work as urban dwellers.
2150 is very thesis-driven. We start by laying out the big problems faced and caused by urban environments, and seek to deeply understand what causes those problems and which technologies and innovations could seek in order to mitigate them.
Measurable, environmentally and/or socially positive outcomes
What is your definition of “impact”, Christian?
Environmental or societal positive (and measurable) outcomes beyond financials.
Joint focus to address the climate challenge
What do you say is one of the most important issues that needs to be solved over the next decade?
It is time for "all hands on deck" to jointly focus on addressing the climate challenge. This applies to governments, academia, investors, and entrepreneurs, all seeking to support innovation and technologies that can help reverse the negative impact we have had on our planet. Luckily a newfound sense of urgency has arisen in the past few years.
A specific area of focus for us is the human addiction to cement and concrete which represents 8% of world CO2 emissions. This led us to invest into Carbon Cure out of Canada, which is the world's most deployed carbon capture and use technology, live in over 300 concrete factories worldwide.
Carbon taxing
Within your sector, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges in the impact space that stand in the way of providing solutions faster?
*If* there was a global, transparent and liquid price on Carbon, action would start taking place at a much more appropriate speed. Carbon taxes and carbon pricing for offsets is opaque, wildly varying and not properly traceable. Certain innovations that could have a material impact on climate could be commercialised profitably, negative actions by heavy emitters could be punished publicly, and individual actions at work and at home would carry a quantifiable consequence.
Impact through gigacorns
Tell us more about the long-term vision you have for your work and how you measure & quantify your impact.
We rally around the notion of hunting for Gigacorns (commercially viable companies that have the potential to lower CO2 emissions by 1Gt per year).
Profit and purpose?
Within your work, Christian, what are some of the misconceptions you’ve noticed regarding what “impact” is all about?
"Impact" investing continues to have an outdated correlation with philanthropy. "Social entrepreneurs" have good-minded ambitions but will never make their investors real money. Double-line companies are just a marketing ploy. Greenwashing is the real reason for so many corporate promises. Profit and purpose cannot co-exist.
