Startup Series: BasiGo

Mar 30

Today's guests are Jit Bhattacharya, Co-Founder & CEO of BasiGo, and Alex Roetter, Managing Director & General Partner at Moxxie VC.

Jit has been a technology leader in rechargeable (lithium-ion) batteries for more than 12 years. He worked as the CEO of Mission Motors in Silicon Valley and was a senior manager at Project Titan — the secret electric car project by Apple Inc. More recently, he served as the chief technology officer of Fenix International, an off-grid solar home system company acquired by the French multinational electric utility company ENGIE in 2018.

Alex is an engineer, leader, investor, and aviator who loves bringing new products and services to life. Alex was formerly the President of Kitty Hawk (an eVTOL company) and was previously the SVP of Engineering at Twitter. Alex has over a decade of experience investing in and advising early to late-stage private companies, including Coinbase, Mainstreet, Nuro, Sauce Labs, Digits, Caption Health, and Certn. He is the co-chair of the Visible Hands VC Fellowship Advisory Committee and an observer on their Board of Directors. Alex started his career as a software engineer at Google and various other early startups.

BasiGo is an e-mobility startup looking to revolutionize the public transportation sector by providing public transport bus owners with a cost-effective electric alternative to diesel. Headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, our team is strategically composed of seasoned entrepreneurs who have spent over a decade working and innovating within electric vehicle technology, mobility in Africa, and renewable energy financing. The team is dedicated to creating an inclusive, sustainable mobility revolution in Africa. Moxxie VC invested in the startup in February 2022 during Basigo's seed round.

In this episode, I'm joined by investor and founder who added insights to the climatetech startup process. Jit discusses why EV buses are the future of public transportation, Kenya's reliance on renewable energy sources, and how he founded the company. Alex dives into investing in an international startup, how the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, and why Moxxie funded BasiGo. This is a great episode to understand the founder/investor relationship in climatetech.

Enjoy the show!

You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@mcjcollective.com, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded March 21st, 2022

In Today's episode, we cover:

An overview of BasiGo & Moxxie VC
Jit's motivations for starting BasiGo and how the idea came to fruition
How Moxxie VC balances being a generalist firm with for-profit LPs and expectations, especially around climate investing
BasiGo's climate solution to diesel-powered vehicles in a country that current depends 90% on renewables
Why BasiGo was the right fit for Moxxie to invest in
How US-based investors can and should invest in global startups
Why BasiGo is tackling EV buses and the barriers that have stopped other startups from solving this problem
Three trends that make BasiGo successful: cost of batteries, financing, and supply chain
Key phases and stages that BasiGo needs to hit to go to market successfully
How the unknowns from taxes to OP to legal affect international climate investing
BasiGo's recent equity round and the goals and milestones the company hopes to achieve with this influx of capital
Why verifying debt is important before making early-stage equity investments
The barriers and anxieties when testing a new product and what BasiGo hopes to learn with their first fleet of buses
The biggest risks that come with scaling tech and existing infrastructure simultaneously
The state of charging infrastructure generally
What Jit and Alex would change if they had a magic wand

Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey Show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey or MCJ, as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1300 members.
There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing, there's four criteria we screen for: determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better.
There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you wanna learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website and click the become a member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. For today's guest, we've got a twofer. We've got Jit Bhattacharya who is co-founder and CEO of BasiGo which is an e-mobility startup in Africa that's looking to revolutionize the public transportation sector by providing public transport bus owners with a cost effective electric alternative to diesel.
And we've also got Alex Roetter, managing director and general partner at Moxxie Ventures, an early stage generalist technology venture capital firm that recently participated in BasiGo's seed round. We have a great discussion in this episode about BasiGo, what they're up to, the origin story for the company. We talk about the existing mobility landscape in Africa. We talk about the desired futures state, how to get there, BasiGo's innovative approach, entry point, progress to date, risks, challenges, opportunities, how they think about phasing and staging, sources of capital and of course, if they're successful, what it is that they've achieved.
And then we also talk about Moxxie Ventures and how as a generalist VC, they're thinking about climate tech investing. We talk about what types of companies are interesting to them. We talk about what it is that attracted them to BasiGo, how they handle things like diligence, not just of the company, but of the market landscape especially given that this is a company primarily doing business in Africa, and Moxxie primarily invests here in the US. We also talk about the role of venture capital in general versus other source of capital and we talk about the future and what other types of opportunities would be interesting for Moxxie within climate tech. Great discussion, and I hope you enjoy it. Alex, Jit, welcome to the show.
Alex Roetter: Thanks for having us.
Jit Bhattacharya: Thanks for having Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Oh, of course. And a- as I mentioned before the show, this is interest... Well, it's interesting for a number of reasons, but two in particular. One, we've got the investor and the portfolio company, both, which I don't think we've done before, and if we have, I'm forgetting. And the other thing is that we've done hundreds of episodes at this point, but most of them have been US centric. And that's not because we think that the US is more important to solving the climate challenge than- than other geographies, it's just been because we've got a tiny team and because that's where we are and with time zones and- and things like that, but I can't wait to broaden our reach. And- and the fact that this is an Africa focused company is so important and I'm so excited to have that perspective on the show. So thank you for that.
Jit Bhattacharya: Yeah. Couldn't be more excited to share the story for that here.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And- and for starters, maybe just introduce yourself. So Jit, why don't you go first and talk a bit about BasiGo and- and what you do? And then Alex, I'll ask you to do the same with Moxxie.
Jit Bhattacharya: Totally. So thanks again for having Jason. My name is Jit Bhattacharya. I am the co-founder and CEO of BasiGo, Inc. We are a company that's looking to bring electric public transit here to Sub-Saharan Africa. For a number of reasons that I know that we're gonna get into, this is particularly impactful. Introducing this technology into this part of the world is particularly impactful from a climate perspective so really looking forward to share the story.
By background, I am an electro mechanical engineer. I actually came from Silicon Valley. So you hear my accent. I'm not African, I'm American, but my wife and I have been living here in East Africa now for four years. And it really is an exciting market for a number of reasons. I mean, number one, it's just an incredible place to live, people are incredible. But number two, this is going to be the growth engine of the next 10 to 20 years. And so from a climate perspective, it is important for that reason as well. So looking forward to sharing the story of what it is that we're doing with BasiGo, and I'll hand it over to Alex.
Alex Roetter: Thanks, Jason. So I'm the general partner and managing director of Moxxie Ventures. We're a seed stage venture capital firm. We invest globally, predominantly in the United States, but we do invest globally. We're a generalist firm, but really interested in climate tech for reasons that I'm sure we'll get into and that are probably pretty obvious to all of your listeners. My background is in computer science. I was a software engineer for a long time.
I then ran engineering teams, I ran engineering at Twitter for many years. I've been investing for a long time, but my last job before switching over to invest full time was running a project called Kittyhawk Flyer, which was an eVTOL company, an electric flying car company. I have a background in aviation. So I did get to run a, you know, a company that was hardware software regulatory, BD, all of the things. But really my background in training and- and most of my work has been in software.
Jason Jacobs: And then Alex, you're also investors in BasiGo, correct?
Alex Roetter: We are that's right. Yep. We invested in BasiGo in- in their recent round and we're so excited about it. Jit is amazing, the problem space is amazing. What they're doing is really interesting and so I'm really excited to talk about that.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And Jit, maybe talk a bit about the origin story for the company. How did it come about, when did it come about and why did it come about?
Jit Bhattacharya: Sure. So where it came about was I was actually working as an investor here in East Africa. So I'm based in Nairobi, Kenya. And I was working as an investor here in the clean tech space. Looking at the emerging e-mobility sector, e-mobility is just getting started here in East Africa and most of the focus has been on micro mobility. But while I was working as an investor, I was really interested in how this could be applied to buses or what we call public service vehicles here.
And just for some quick background, for those people who maybe haven't been to the region, we are a bus dominated culture here in Sub-Saharan Africa. We like to joke actually when Uber first came out with UberPool, it's like, "Oh great. This tech company finally caught up to what Africa's been doing, frankly, for the last 20, 30 years with mini bus taxis." We don't have a formal bus sector. It's a private sector market that really is now growing up into being a bus sector. It started as these mini bus taxis, these vans that would pick people up and now it's becoming a formalized bus sector.
And these buses are everywhere. When you live here in East Africa, there are times where you feel like you're literally surrounded by buses when you are driving on the road. And these buses are particularly pernicious here for a reason that we discovered during COVID, and that is when you're driving behind them at any given moment, you will find that you're just flooded with black smoke. That's 'cause these are diesel buses and oftentimes the particulate emissions filters are just cut off in order to improve fuel efficiency.
Because these are private sector operators, they're people like you or me who are running these buses and so the toxic air pollution from them is just... it's especially bad when you live here. We deal with this every single day. We had this incredible moment here in East Africa in the first few days of COVID. So the government lockdown and all transit had to stop, all the buses stopped. And within two, three days here in Nairobi, for the first time 30 years, we could see Mount Kenya from the city of Nairobi. Mount Kenya is almost 350 kilometers away.
And so that showed us, it gave us a glimpse. I mean, it was really painful that initial lockdown, but it gave us a glimpse of what could happen if we cleaned up this sector. And unlike places like India and China, where, you know, you're- you've been hearing especially in China of how transit has been electrified, right? China is leading the world right now in transit electrification, but there's a problem. These cities that China is electrifying transit in, they're surrounded by coal plants.
But here in Kenya, and one of the things that I knew being an investor was we have the benefit of 90% of elec- our electricity already comes from renewables. So we don't have that problem that India and China have. In fact, if we electrified transit here, it would have a greater marginal impact on climate emissions and that air pollution problem than almost anywhere else in the world. And so that was the motivation. I started looking at as an investor and then realized, you know what? Nobody is attacking this problem in the way that we wanted.
And so my co-founder and I, Jonathan Green, we came from the asset finance, the energy asset finance space here in Sub-Saharan Africa and we said the same problem that we have with, you know, renewable energy, we have here in commercial electric- commercial electric vehicles, it's a finance problem. And so let's bring to bear our knowledge of the market, our knowledge of the technology and our knowledge of finance to actually try to solve this problem and actually help people make more money and deploy these buses, electric buses in a place where the marginal impact would be greater.
So we got off our butts and we decided to launch BasiGo, and it's been a crazy ride. So we launched around May of 2021, COVID was still very much a thing, but it has been an incredible ride. And I will say kind of in closing that is whenever we talk about what it is that we are doing here in East Africa, people get so absurdly excited. And that's because they think this problem of these diesel buses and the emissions they produce, it's an intractable problem. Nobody ever believed it was going to be solved.
And yet here in Kenya, there's a strong belief in technology. I mean, in many ways, they pride themselves because we're one of the key innovators in digital finance through a thing called M-PESA. And so there's re- readiness to adopt new technology. We're working on a problem that basically everybody wants to be solved. And so the level of support we have from inside the country is absolutely incredible. So yeah, that's where we all got started. It's been a great ride since, and it's been even better since Moxxie got involved.
Jason Jacobs: Well, thank you for that Jit. And I- I ha- have lots of questions, but I feel like for this, you know, kind of investor and portfolio company episode, for whatever reason, I have this vision of the When Harry Met Sally... where it's like, you have like Billy Crystal and then Meg Ryan, and then Billy Crystal and then Meg Ryan. So it's like I- I don't want to get too far down the path with you, I'm now gonna switch to Alex. So Alex-
Jit Bhattacharya: Can I ask who you think is Billy and who you think is Meg?
Jason Jacobs: [Laughs]. Oh, no, you can't, you can't.
Alex Roetter: So I'm not gonna ask that 'cause I don't wanna know the answer.
Jason Jacobs: [Laughs].
Alex Roetter: I dunno which is worse or better.
Jason Jacobs: [Laughs]. That also dates me by the way, because most of our listeners probably have no clue about When Harry Met Sally... It's like an antique movie. But at any rate, Alex, so you grew up in traditional tech operating in entrepreneurship and then you are now a VC and it's a generalist firm, but you mentioned you have an interest in climate, which I knew because we are frequent collaborators. But can you talk a bit about how you balance being a generalist firm with mercenary for-profit LPs and expectations with your desire to do more in climate and how you've navigated trying to put capital to work without being a reckless fiduciary?
Alex Roetter: Right, that's a great question. Well, first I should say we are a hundred percent a for profit. What'd you say, mercenary? I don't know if I describe it that way, but we are...
Jason Jacobs: [Laughs].
Alex Roetter: We're here to make LPs money. I mean, one thing we're very proud of we're-
Jason Jacobs: You're a greedy capitalist, a greedy capitalist.
Alex Roetter: We're a greedy capitalist.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. [Laughs].
Alex Roetter: I mean, one thing I'm very proud of is the quality of the LPs we have, right? And they are trying to do things like fund teachers' retirements and fund tuition. And so we are trying to make them as much money as possible. So that is a- a hundred percent what we're trying to do. That said, the biggest companies are built from solving real problems, right? And we tend not to invest in areas that to me look more like solutions looking for problems.
Climate is the number one problem facing the whole planet. Not only that, I don't exactly know the exact ordering of problems two through 10, but I'm pretty sure that climate change makes all of them worse. You know, refugee flows, war, access to water, housing insecurity, food insecurity, the widening rich poor gap. All of that gets worse with climate change. So this is the biggest problem that we're facing. And it also touches every single part of the economy, right?
Everything from the built environment, agriculture, transportation, energy, and everything in between. And you just can't reinvent the whole economy without making somebody a bunch of money so we'd like it to be our LPs. There's really no tension between the thing that we want to do and what makes money. We think this is just a massive, massive economic opportunity. One thing that we think about a lot is we are hired by LPs to make smart decisions. And so why are we hired versus someone else hired?
So in our case, we both came my partner, Katie Stanton, who also founder of the firm a few years earlier and I both came from mostly consumer, but broadly internet software companies. So software is a component. So we will invest when there's some software component. So they're really great ideas and certain things that need to happen in climate that I used to do personally when I was an angel investor, because if I'm an angel investor, you know, if my wife's cool with it and I'm cool with it, I can do whatever I want. I'm very fortunate that way.
But when we think about our fiduciary responsibility, the institution investors, we really are cognizant of where are areas where, you know, I don't think I'm an expert at anything, but if I have an argument I'm an expert at anything, it's gotta be in software, not something else. Certainly know more about that. I'm less clueless in software than anything else in my life. So it has some sort of software component.
So we do restrict ourselves a little bit. We will do hardware companies when there's a software component. You know, imagine an IoT company that's building sensors. Really just to run a data and software play, we would do that. One area that we don't invest as a firm, at least now because we're still ramping up, but we haven't made the jump to writing an institutional check yet are pure science risk kind of companies. We're not right for that yet. It's also not an area where we think we could be as helpful.
And you know, both Katie and I having come from long operational backgrounds really like to help companies and dive in. And we've run teams for a long time and run companies and made a lot of mistakes, and I at least have gotten a lot of gray hair and- and learned a lot of things and we really like to help. So we filter companies where we think our background and software can really be useful.
Jason Jacobs: Great. So we're at the point in the story where- where Jit uncovered that without the diesel polluting, you know, life could be so much grander and how do we get diesel to not pollute on a more permanent basis? And hey, unlike some other parts of the world, 90% of our electricity in Kenya comes from renewables. And we know about financing and so we can bring finance to bear in helping get more electric buses on the road. So- so I get the key tenets of the area that you want to define a solution in Jit, but can you talk a bit about the solution itself?
Jit Bhattacharya: Yeah, definitely. And I think in there ill- will also be where we came together with Moxxie and everything that Alex just described, right? And so the core element of a lot of this was just, we looked at the bus space, we looked at the potential impact, but let me actually take a step back. So I have been working in the electric vehicle industry since 2007. I was an electric vehicle technology entrepreneur all the way back in 2007, went through cleantech 1.0 and in the process, right? We were really early... cleantech 1.0 was really quite different from what we're going to and clear in cleantech 2.0.
And one of the things that motivated us with BasiGo was to say we need to just start mitigating emissions as quickly as possible now. You know, Alex talked a little bit about science risk. And in many ways, I was working on science and technology risk for so many years in Silicon Valley. And we wanted to shift our gear towards what can start to mitigate emissions absolutely right now. And so we looked at the bus sector here and we said, "Okay, here's a sector where there's over 20,000 buses in the city of Nairobi alone."
That's one city here in East Africa. Every single bus that we can displace with electric because the grid so green would mitigate 50 tons of CO2 per year of operation. That's an incredible opportunity in one city and then look at this continent wide and that opportunity grows a lot more. But at the same time, we're dealing with Africa. This is an emerging market. Now it is an emerging market which I wanna also put in context Africa right now is home to six of the fastest growing economies in the world.
The city of Nairobi has already become a mega city. The greater Nairobi metropolitan area is already 10 million people. Okay? So we talk a lot about how Africa is only 3% of global emissions, right? Jason, you were saying how you haven't alo- had a lot of companies outside of the US. Well, that's because the emissions problem is very focused on the US and China and yet what do we know? What we know is that Africa is growing so fast it is going to become the China and India of the next decade.
If we don't solve the emissions problem now, something the world has never done before, which is find a true path to sustainable development, all we're doing is kicking this can down the road and we're gonna be finding- facing another emissions crisis from emerging markets like Africa in 10 years. Now that being said, it is an emerging market today. So what does that mean? That means that all of these different bus investors today, right? All the people who operate buses today, they are cash sensitive, right? Like incomes here are not high, people are not wealthy. It is about cash.
You can't go to somebody and say, "Hey, buy this electric bus. Trust us, you're gonna make your money back in four to five years. Okay? It's gonna actually make your more money in seven to eight years." That won't work. Nobody will buy that. And this is exactly what we learned when we were selling solar energy and battery systems across Sub-Saharan Africa in our previous business. So the solution that we came up with is, well, electric buses are booming. They are... I mean, there's massive investment.
Billions of dollars of investment are going into electric buses are all over the world. We don't need to reinvent the electric bus. Through my networks in Silicon Valley, I had a relationship with BYD, BYD is currently the largest electric bus manufacturer in the world. Let's get a BYD electric bus, let's make sure that it works on the ground here. Let's make sure that we can support it with the right- with smart infrastructure so that there's practically zero behavior change for bus operators who are currently using diesel.
And then the most important thing we came up with was let's create a financing model. And this is actually a financing model that was pioneered in the United States by a bus company called Proterra, really well known. One of... right? Founded by Ryan Popple, one of the original electric vehicle companies that I actually knew going all the way back to cleantech 1.0. And the key element of that model was let's separate the cost of the battery from the cost of the bus.
And if you do that with the way that the electric bus supply chain currently works, you can actually sell an electric bus at a competitive cost to diesel and then you bundle the lease of that battery with charging and with many maintenance, and actually you provide an economic opex benefit to these bus operators. They're saving money on a daily basis while having purchased a bus that costs the same amount as their diesel buses. And that's the core to this solution. We call it pay as you drive battery financing.
And what it does is it makes an electric bus as affordable as a diesel while helping bus operators save money. That is a proposition that African bus operators who are cash sensitive can absolutely get behind and what- lets us get to the most important thing in climate change and climate may change mitigation scale, right? Now we can go out there in the same way that the solar industry went out and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, now billions of dollars in capital to finance solar PPAs. That's what we aspire to do. Let's create a model that can raise that level of capital for commercial electric vehicles across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Jason Jacobs: Okay, so now I understand the key tenets of both the opportunity and the potential solutions. So here, Alex, we have this generalist tech firm who understands that climate is such a huge problem that will also make other problems worse if left unaddressed. And with that problem comes inevitable solutions and comes money to be made as well. So help me understand what is it about BasiGo that attracted you, that's one thing, but then a second thing that goes along with that is how did you get... You said you were primarily a US investor, so how do you get comfortable investing in a part of the world where you don't have expertise?
Alex Roetter: Both great questions. So uh, Jason, I've listened you've for hours and hours on the show so I feel like you'll resonate with this. You know, there's a balance, there's the thing that you're comfortable with and there's also where you're going, both because the world's problems are pointing you in that direction and because you like to learn and grow as a person. And it's sort of always a struggle. If you do all the former, it's very boring.
And if you do a hundred percent a thing where you're completely outta your depth, you know, it's like getting thrown into the deep end of the pool and that can be scary as well. So it's a balance. I first got introduced to BasiGo by a mutual friend. Jit and I went to the same undergrad. We didn't know each other in college, but we had mutual friends so we got introduced. And he introduced me saying, "Hey, my friend Jit is doing these really interesting things."
Jason Jacobs: This really is Harry Met Sally right here.
Alex Roetter: There you go.
Jason Jacobs: You went to the same undergrad and didn't know each other. [Laughs].
Alex Roetter: That's right.
Jit Bhattacharya: [crosstalk 00:22:12]. [Laughs]. That's right.
Alex Roetter: And he introduced me basically saying, "Hey, Jit is super smart, really interesting background, doing a cool thing. I'm sure it's not a Moxxie investment, but you should meet him anyway." So that's how it started basically. And so we met and we started ch- chatting and you know, when we look at something new, we try to think, "Okay, there's initially your gut reaction about what you think you should do." And as I mentioned, I've been angel investor for a long time, but in terms of being a GP running institutional capital, it's pretty new. So I sort of thought, you know, shouldn't I do some enterprise SaaS thing based in Mountain View, California is my first couple bets. Like how do new GPS get fired? Right? Like how does it happen?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. That's the equivalent of like no one gets fired for buying IBM, right?
Alex Roetter: Right. It's like, what is the opposite of IBM? Right.
Jason Jacobs: [Laughs].
Alex Roetter: But, you know, I think you just have to be disciplined about your thinking. And we look at people, product, market and timing basically. And of those two, people and market are the most important things. If you find excellent people in expanding markets, you have a really good shot of making a real dent against your problem and building a- a massive company. The product is part of that, but the product can change. You know, people don't really change as much.
Generally massive switch is ent- entirely different markets, don't change. And timing is also kind of a subpart of a market to be honest. So we said, "Okay, let's understand the space." And so we just started talking through, you know, our initial gut is this- this is a kind of out of- outta left field investment for us, but let's burn through wh- why do we really think that, what are the reasons to say no, and sort of, we just rigorously burned- burned through that but it comes back to mostly people in market.
I mean, Jit has, you know, it's been very modest before, but has an incredible background both running Silicon Valley style venture funded companies in Silicon Valley itself, living in Africa for a long period of time, understand that market, having been an investor in Africa. His co-founder Jonathan is a real financial wizard, has an extremely elaborate and nuanced view of this market and where the pain points are. And so it's we got very convinced this is the right team to solve this problem.
And then the second question is, is it an interesting problem to solve? Is it a big problem? Can we... You know, like I said, we're VCs, we have to return our fund multiple times with a single winner. So is the problem big enough? And that was pleasantly surprising when we dove into that. When you look at future population growth in Africa, the number of buses, the revenue you can get per bus because power is relatively cheap and these diesel buses are expensive to operate and the availability of capital subsidize the upfront costs, this actually works and this works at a scale where it will compare very favorably to existing companies also in Africa when you look at their revenue and the multiples they're starting to get now in later stage financing and even public offerings.
So we sort of started with, let's find the reason to back up our initial gut, that this is not a Moxxie investment, and we couldn't find any. And in fact, the more homework we did, the more excited we got. So in the end, it became a very easy natural thing. And- and I think that just shows kind of the power of like don't believe everything you think like go through and work it out. Oftentimes, you know, with experience, your gut will be correct, but- but sometimes it won't be, and all the returns in venture are from doing the non-obvious things.
Jason Jacobs: So Jit, back over to you. So I understand that you are offering electric buses at a price that is not more expensive than the diesel alternative, but then wrapping in an experience that makes it more compelling emissions aside. Can you talk a l- a little bit about why this hasn't been done before and also what stops others from following in your footsteps and doing it as good or better?
Jit Bhattacharya: I'll answer your second question first Jason. I hope lots of people follow in our footsteps. Because when you talk about a market where over 90% of the electricity is already renewable, and that's not just Kenya, this is across the region, we are one of the world leaders in the percent of electricity that's coming from renewables.
Jason Jacobs: Why is that, and how do we get more regions to look like that?
Jit Bhattacharya: Yeah, I should have said more about that.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. [Laughs].
Jit Bhattacharya: It benefits from really large reserves of hydro and geothermal. So actually I just saw a report that in 2021, 50% of the electricity generated in Kenya came from geothermal. So in this region, but not just in East Africa, also in places like West Africa, there are heavy reserves of renewables. And so as a result, once again, we talk about electrify everything, right? Electrifying transport in this region has this greater marginal impact simply because of the percentage of renewables that are available on the grid already.
Oh, and by the way, we have an under consumption problem. So all these renewables on the grid, at night we have massive oversupply. These renewables get burned away because not enough people in industry and factories are actually consuming electricity at night. And so if we actually pull this business model off, we're solving two problems at once. We're mitigating emissions and air pollution, but at the same time we're actually bolstering the utilities here, which is a good thing. 'Cause a lot of the utilities in Sub-Saharan Africa are struggling. But yeah, that aside, you know, going back to... Well actually remind me, Jason, what was your first question again? Now I'm- now I'm now I'm kind of off track.
Jason Jacobs: Why hasn't this been done already? 'Cause see, I mean the diesel s- you know, the diesel smoke, it's like obviously not good on a number of levels and the world is moving towards EVs. I don't think that is disputable. So where has it been?
Jit Bhattacharya: It's a great question, and it's really the confluence of three trends. So the first trend is the reduction in cost of batteries and then the resulting reduction in cost of electric vehicles, right? The cost of something like an electric bus has fallen 50% since 2010 as an example. And the all of a sudden, it's crossed the threshold. We've reached a tipping point where now it can make sense. But you still have to solve these other two problems. So the second is this problem of financing.
But one of the things that we have seen here in Sub-Saharan Africa across the renewable energy sector is that if you bring financing to bear, if you can move some of the capex over to opex and actually provide a net economic benefit, then there is a market that is hungry to adopt these renewable technologies and these clean technologies. So the second is finance. It's been proven now in a number of sectors in both the utility scale sector, in the off grid sector, where we were working before and now in the emerging immobility sector, starting with micro mobility and now we're hoping to do it for buses. So that's the other thing.
You have to have that expertise in finance in order to be able to pull it off. Okay? And then the third is when you're talking about something like buses and passenger cars, you're talking about now working with the global OEMs who are producing these vehicles. Remember there's a n- the electric vehicle market here is nascent. The leading manufacturers who are providing to this market are folks like Isuzu and Toyota. These are not companies that have been pushing EVs.
They're not pushing them and they're not gonna come in with financing solutions to move that capex to opex. So it takes a specific expertise. And that's frankly where we come in. The people who combine the technical expertise around electric vehicles with the financing expertise to actually pull off a business model like this. My hope Jason, is that by doing this, by having the expertise to actually do it, I hope there's copycats, I really do. Because frankly we're 10 years too late, right?
If we were serious about addressing the climate crisis, this would've been a transition that didn't need to wait for an economic tipping point. It would've happened 10 years ago with international support and things like that. We are late and we knew need to kick it off and it's gonna take more than just BasiGo in order to be able to actually do it at the rate we need to execute this transformation.
Jason Jacobs: And Jit, can you talk a bit about how you envision going to market, what the key phases look like and what phase you're in today?
Jit Bhattacharya: Well, yeah, that's the most incredible part. So we have two electric buses, the very first two electric buses to ever be in Kenya. We launched them two weeks ago with the support of the government. We are putting them into operations. So the entire market here is private sector. Unlike what we're used to in the west where it's public transit agencies, here it's all private sector operators lightly regulated. And so we are putting those first two buses into operation with two pioneering bus operators here in the city.
And actually tomorrow for the first time, tomorrow being... What is today? Today's the 21st of March. So tomorrow, March 22nd for the very first time, passengers in Kenya are gonna get a chance to ride on electric bus. I mean, we're- we're kind of over the moon about this. It's gonna be an incredible experience. And so we're- we're... We've got frames and everything to take photos of the very first passengers to go on these buses.
Our plan is alongside the launch of these two buses in a pilot because you know, nobody's tested a technology like this before here in this market so we're gonna be testing them extensively. But a alongside that, just like we saw with Tesla and with Rivian and with Lucid, we're already starting to take reservations and the reservation list is blowing up. So that shows that at the right price point operators here are absolutely willing to adopt the technology.
Our plan is to deliver at least our first 10 here later this year. We wish we could deliver more but one of the key problems we actually have to solve is we have to locally assemble these buses. There's a strong incentive to be able to locally assemble vehicles, diesel vehicles are already doing it. Electric, in order to compete, we're gonna have to solve that problem as well. So our aim is to deliver 10 locally assembled vehicles this year and then scale 10X the following year, and then ideally 10X the year after that. Right now demand would suggest that that is exactly what we're gonna be able to do.
Jason Jacobs: And Jit, do you envision that you'll work exclusively with existing operators or is there a strategic question about whether you might wanna become an operator yourself over time?
Jit Bhattacharya: Yeah. Oh, it's a great question. Because the thing that we're seeing here in Sub-Saharan Africa, right, is electrification is not the only technology. Ride sharing is really big here. We're seeing one of the most well known companies, startup companies right now in the transport sector in Sub-Saharan Africa is a company called Swvl. Swvl is redefining bus transport, like basically bringing tech to bear on how people use buses.
Remember 40% of trips here in Sub-Saharan Africa are by bus. So this is how everybody gets around and Swvl's redefining that. So we, right now, our plan is to enable and empower the existing bus operators in the sector with this technology. And yet at the same time, we are all watching the trends of how public transit is changing here in this market. And we're gonna have to be ready to adapt because our goal is electrification. We're focused on climate emissions, we're focused on air pollution and however the sector evolves, we are gonna stay true and core to that mission.
Jason Jacobs: Well, I have more questions, but switching gears for a moment. So Alex, we talked about generalists doing more in climate and what gets you excited and your decision process for- for investing in- in BasiGo. One question I didn't ask is when it comes to assessing opportunities that are outside of the United States, how much do you worry about unknown unknowns as it relates to things like tax, legal, IP, corruption, relationships? Like just like kind of the local landscape that maybe you take for granted if you're investing in a- in a domestic company, just having, you know, been here for- for so long and- and operating professionally in so many different capacities here, how do you think about that when it comes to investing in Africa or any region around the world for that matter?
Alex Roetter: So that's a fair question, we spent a lot of time thinking about that. There are a couple things you do. One, you know, speaking of doing the thing that you know and branching out into the thing that's unknown, but at the right rate, most of our investments are in the United States operating in the United States so we're not doing a hundred percent internationally. We'll see how it goes, we'll learn and then the future will be what the future is based on- based on what we learn.
Two, there are just some practical things. So BasiGo is a Delaware C-Corporation that's operating in Nairobi. That makes a lot of things easier, the equity and the financing and the IP and all that sort of stuff, so that really helps. That's... There are no hard rules in venture, but I think that's having not done that once already, I would say that's as close to a hard rule as we have. It makes it a lot easier and then you have the operating subsidiary wherever.
But there are also... there are other things that that doesn't protect you. I mean, certainly interaction with local governments. And we're very lucky. Why I'm lucky for a variety of reasons to work with Katie, one is she has a background working in the federal government, the state department, and has seen how the state department has helped in- in other countries when their issues with local governments and getting financing and some anti-corruption measures and other things. And so we thought we had a little bit expertise there to help with a little bit of those problems.
Should they come up? Also, I should say it's not like there's the US and everywhere else. There's massive variation in terms of IP and the quality of governments and- and how friendly the business environment it is. And of course, we researched that stuff and Kenya ranks very highly on all these measures so we got very comfortable with that as well. But it certainly, you know, it's a consideration, but again, opportunities are globally distributed, talent is globally distributed and so you really want to do fine bets that make a ton of sense, but aren't obvious yet.
Jason Jacobs: And Jit, I know you recently closed, I think it was a $4 million equity round. Can you talk a little bit about the goals at that capital and the key milestones and also just how you think about staging and you know, what that next phase looks like and- and as far beyond that as- as you've thought through at this point?
Jit Bhattacharya: Yeah. I mean, we are so excited about the round because alongside Moxxie in the US, the other investor that we had come into the round and led the round was Novastar Ventures. Novastar is an impact investment fund out of the UK, but they have a major office here in Kenya. So to get the support of both US traditional commercial oriented venture capital, with a, one of the leading impact investors, frankly here on the ground in Kenya, it was- it was basically the perfect round. We couldn't have envisioned or hoped for two stronger investors to be behind the company.
What's the purpose behind this round? This round is basically what we are using now to establish our track record through the pilot, but also then to establish demand. So like I said, we are growing that reservation list. We're growing the partnerships that we need to do. A business model like this, we are at our core, we're a financing company, we're a software enabled financing company, which I think is another area where we were very aligned to the Moxxie thesis.
We weren't trying to invent a new electric bus, we weren't trying to be a huge manufacturing company. We are fundamentally a commercial electric vehicle finance company powered by software, especially around battery management and battery prediction. And so along those lines, we're basically proving our model, proving the demand exists for the product, and then proving that repayment rates and everything that we need in order to prove that financing model are going to match what we've been projecting. And then from there, ideally take this to scale. And scale is a combination for us of equity and debt because we are financing company. So the goals of this are really to prove that that battery financing model that we think is core to enabling scale.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And when you say demand and reservation list, are you talking about the demand from the bus operators or are you talking about the demand from passengers?
Jit Bhattacharya: It's a little bit of both but frankly our core customer is definitely bus operators. And yet what we're also seeing, we think of the passenger as well as for... as our customer, because this is once again, it's a private sector market, it's unregulated. If we've got a product that's more appealing, which frankly we do, I- I wanna... I'll share one quick story that a lot of your listeners are probably not aware of. So we talk about buses here, 20,000 buses here in Nairobi alone.
And what are those buses? Those buses, actually if you look at how these diesel buses are built, they're actually trucks. They're what are called a truck chassis cab where then they're handed over to a local coach builder and somebody builds a bus on top. So if you ever get onto a bus here in Nairobi, it feels, yes, you're sitting in a seat, but it feels like you're in the back of a truck. You are hearing metal clanging, you're smelling diesel fumes. It feels like you're in the back of an army truck when you're driving around the city of Nairobi.
By comparison already, the people who've ridden around on our bus, it is silent. They comment on how all of a sudden they can hear traffic because the bus itself is so quiet, how they forgot what it's like to ride in a bus without smelling diesel fumes. I mean, it's just... It's a completely... It's revolutionizing the bus experience here for average commuters. Now, you know, when we think about that, we think about our customer's customer as our customer.
And so absolutely, we think about passengers because if there's more demand for our bus, which right now all signs point to there's gonna be increased passenger demand for our buses. That's going to accelerate demand from bus operators to want to adopt this technology. Nobody's gonna wanna be left out. They're gonna say yes, a portion of our fleet needs to be electric, we gotta keep up with the Joneses here. So yeah, we think about both it's our customer, but our core customer is of course the bus operators.
Jason Jacobs: And for those bus operators, I would assume they're not gonna go from using zero electric to a hundred percent, they'll probably test. And you mentioned there's the first couple buses will be on the road and that's a big milestone. If they do work with you for the electric and it's one piece and they haven't standardized across, how well does that fit into everything else that they do and what else needs to change in order to accommodate it?
Jit Bhattacharya: If we ask them to make a major behavior change in order to adopt this, I think once again, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot, both in terms of our business, but also in terms of climate impact. We need to make this as seamless for them to adopt and use as possible. And so we've focused a lot on this idea of almost no behavior change. The way the buses here work, they run from about 5:00, 6:00 in the morning until 10:00 or 11:00 at night. And then actually what happens is a lot of these bus operators have relationships with a gas station where in exchange for guaranteeing that they will buy diesel from them every night, they get free parking.
Buses here actually sleep every single night from about 10:00 or 11:00 at night to 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. It's perfect for an electric. If you can get an electric that meets the operating range, you get to charge on off peak electricity every single night. So the way in which we have designed our model, our model is basically we set up charging depots that are owned and operated by us that are right next to where these petrol stations are or sometimes inside the petrol stations themselves. So what happens? For a bus operator, it literally looks no different for them to run an electric bus compared to a diesel.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And I have more questions Jit, but just pause for one moment. Alex, this company requires a bunch of debt. How do you feel about capital intensity sources of capital and how important is it to validate and verify that the debt will be there before making that early stage equity investment.
Alex Roetter: Right. It is important. The good news is there is a massive amount of capital of different forms. You know, capital's trying to get a market return, a submarket return and no return that has made make climate commitments, and they don't know how to deploy it. And someone looking at the projects, that's sort of hard to believe because you see there's so many interesting projects that aren't funded yet, but that is really true.
And part of our diligence was really understanding it can be governments, NGOs, for profit companies that are really just trying to look to deploy this capital. But that is absolutely essential. You have to believe that you can get this money. And we're very... we got very comfortable with that when you look at the size and number of these commitments and the fact that the deployment hasn't yet met either the stated rate or what is needed to tackle this problem. But yeah, you have to believe that.
Going back to another thing too that Jit said on the product that I just wanted to mention from investor point of view is it is true that the bus is a much better product. However, we model that as zero incremental benefit where we're looking at it. If people don't care at all about the product and are, as Jit mentioned, a hundred percent cost sensitive, you would still use this product because the operating economics are cheaper than a diesel bus. So we view all of that as much better as it is and it is a lot better. If you look at the photos, it's night and day. That's just pure gravy. That will drive customer demand, but purely economically rationally, bus operators and by extension customers will prefer these buses just because they're cheaper.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for that. And Jit, you mentioned that you are testing these buses in the Kenya market. What are the biggest worries when you test them and what are the most important unknowns that need to... What are you trying to learn when you test these buses there?
Jit Bhattacharya: Well, the good news is we've already been testing for a month. I mean, we're going into passenger operations starting tomorrow, but we have been testing these buses already nonstop for the past month and they are performing incredibly well. We were worried about how would they perform on, uh, Nairobi roads, right? Like Nairobi roads are quite different from Western roads. How would they work when they're fully loaded?
And the performance has been absolutely exceptional. We are getting more range than we expect. The buses are performing beautifully and we can't wait for them to actually go into operations. Frankly, I think our worry right now is no longer around the technology, it's no longer around the product. It is about how are we going to in the same- the same question that you were just asking Alex. We are hyper focused right now on how do we raise the capital to scale?
Because we are... It's clear we've touched on a problem everybody wants solved, the interest is there and yet we're gonna need to be able to raise that capital in order to keep up with demand. And we're gonna need to do that in steps, in stages because we're bringing something brand new to this market. So if you're a debt investor, while the capital like Alex said might exist, they're going to wanna see certain proof points. So we're gonna have to size those incremental steps in the right way.
And yet I will say, right, our tension is we're in a hurry. We're in a hurry because we think we're all late in making transformations like this. And so we wanna get as many buses out there as quickly as possible, but we're gonna have to hit certain milestones and certain proof points along the way in order to raise that next level of capital to support scale.
Jason Jacobs: It's funny that- that the former head of engineering from Twitter in the early days is here for this next question because as I'm sure Alex remembers well, you know, I was just a- an early Twitter user, but once you caught a tiger by the tail and that demand was there, the experience got pretty bad for regular Twitter users because the infrastructure couldn't keep up. And- and Jit, you mentioned that- that you were planning to build out the charging infrastructure.
I can't help but think that there's a big difference between one or two buses on the road and actually widespread scale when it comes to not just the performance of you and the capital being there and the buses themselves on the roads, but the infrastructure that's required to support all those buses on the road from the charging infrastructure to the energy sources, to things I don't even know about and I'm- and I'm not thinking about. So what are the biggest risks when it comes to the infrastructure to scale either that are within your control or especially the stuff that's outside of your control?
Jit Bhattacharya: Well, first let me talk about the enormous asset that we have trying to do this here in East Africa, which is here in Kenya, we have 25% excess supply on the grid. And that sounds like a great thing for e-mobility, but that is a crushing statistic for the national utility that's trying to actually turn a profit and scale and bring electricity to more people and especially rural areas of Africa, 25% excess supply right now on the grid.
When we launched about a week and a half ago, you know, nationally, we had the CEO of Kenya Power, this is the national utility here. She came and spoke at her event. And they are thrilled about this business because of that statistic. They were talking about how right now there is so much excess supply on the grid, they are ready today to support up to 50,000 electric buses of the style and format that we are offering. So this is not a generation and supply problem, but we are still talking about Africa. The problem is around reliability. The problem is around grid infrastructure. And that is one of the concerns.
As we build out this infrastructure, how do we make sure that the reliability of the grid is ready to support, even if the generation is there, how do we make sure that the reliability is there to support daily operations of a commercial electric vehicle? That is definitely a concern and why from day number one, we've had to partner with Kenya Power. We can't just put a hundred buses all of a sudden and just add them to the grid like that. We need to be strategic in terms of where these buses are getting deployed, how we are bringing up local infrastructure to be able to support. It is a very close partnership with the national utility and we'd be foolhardy to try and do that without- without working with them like in lock step.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And you mentioned that there'd be no behavior change or limited, but I can't help but think that from a driver's standpoint, if the driver needs to charge versus filling up at the, you know, at the diesel station, that that is potentially quite a bit of behavior change as it relates to logistics and planning at the company level, but also just like stuff the driver needs to think about when they're out doing their route. Can you talk a bit about that and how you think about that, as well as just the state of that charging infrastructure in general?
Jit Bhattacharya: Yeah, what's amazing is so we've done extensive data analytics right now on how buses exactly are operating here. It was part of our original business planning when even before we formed the company, does this make economic sense? And what do we find? We found that almost 80% of operations here can be met with 250 kilometers of range in a given day. And so we were like, "Okay, well, that's the threshold."
It doesn't address all operations, right? There are buses that are doing 300 to 400, stopping and refueling in the middle of the day. But if you can get to 250 kilometers of range on a single charge, you're basically saying 80% of the buses here in Nairobi can work from 5:00 AM till about 10:00 or 11:00 PM without having to stop to charge. And if you do that, well then you have implemented zero behavior change because they're basically bringing the back- bus back at the end of the day.
We have we recharge our bus in less than four hours, and yet we have six hours to charge and so we have plenty of time to recharge. And that's really the goal. The goal is to address that 80% of the market as a starting point with that 250 of kilometers of range. The good news is we've been running these buses in real world conditions and we are easily getting 250 kilometers of range. And yet we're also thinking about solutions for those people who are doing to him 300 to 400 per day. And we think there's plenty of opportunities like in the rest of the world, with some level of midday charging, we can do this with electric, right? And there's a lot of fear out there. And a lot of what we are doing is simply dissuading people of that notion that electric will somehow be a compromise on their existing operation.
Jason Jacobs: And Alex, for a business like this that's quite capital intensive, how do you think about reserves and follow on at Moxxie and how much do you worry about getting washed out even if a company is successful, given that there's gonna be lots of future financing rounds and, you know, maybe there'll be exceptions, but not every round is always gonna be rosy along the way in many cases?
Alex Roetter: Right. We think about that for all investments. So Moxxie has two types of funds. We have our core seed stage funds that have historically, at least rolling on the second one, but have always been 50% reserved. We also have an opportunity fund now where we can follow on companies that are breakout winners and need more capital than the main funds have available or companies even that come from our previous personal portfolios not the main fund so we think about that.
But, you know, we looked a lot at how much capital they need, and then the type of it. Most of the financing here for the, you know, the buses are all gonna be debt financed, the building out the charging infrastructure will all be debt financed. So that- that won't erode our ownership of the company. Obviously that's an obligation and we- we have to pay it back and interest rates do what they do. But we got comfortable by looking at the types of that capital and the fairly attractive rates that comparable companies have been getting, and that we believe will be available because there's so much global commitment to tackle this problem.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And Jit, looking forwards, for anyone listening that's inspired by your work, who do you wanna hear from, where do you need help?
Jit Bhattacharya: I mean, the biggest thing and the reason that I'm so excited to be here, Jason is just for anybody who's listening to this to share the story. I am sure the last thing on the- the millions of people currently working on climate take, working on this movement, right? And we're all in this movement together to actually start making a dent in emissions, I'm sure the last thing that came to their mind was the idea of electric buses here in East Africa.
And yet with the billions of dollars of money that's fow- flowing into transit electrification around the world, this is where it would have the greatest marginal impact compared to almost anywhere else. And so I am excited just to be here and to share that story that, hey, emerging markets like East Africa, there's something, an area where we lead the world and that is the percentage of our electric or electricity that it's actually coming from renewables.
And so in the movement to electrify everything, we should be starting here. And it's a great opportunity to have an impact on a part of the world that is feeling the greatest impacts from climate change, and that is equatoric emerging markets, right? The global south, especially equatorial countries. And so the fact that we actually have an opportunity to turn a place like Kenya into a leader in sustainable mobility, frankly, it blows my mind and everybody I tell that story to, it blows their mind as well. And we can really, we can really make it happen.
So I'm just excited for your listeners to be able to share that story and anybody else who wants to come and join us in this movement to make this happen, we would welcome the support. There's a lot of different problems that we have to solve in parallel. That's the one thing we admit. We are trying to solve many problems simultaneously to pull this off. But if we pull this off, the impact on climate emissions is going to be enormous. The impact on humanity here in East Africa is gonna be enormous. And so it's- it's a problem worth solving and we're excited to be doing it.
Jason Jacobs: And if you could change one thing outside of your control that would most accelerate your progress, what would you change and how would you change it?
Jit Bhattacharya: [Laughs]. Policy. Isn't that always the answer when we're working in the climate movement, it's always policy, right? Like I am currently... I tell people all the time, what's- what's the greatest challenge we face? The greatest challenge I face is that my biggest competitor is diesel trucks and buses from the likes of Isuzu and Toyota and Nissan. And I'm trying to do that currently at operating at the scale of less than 10 vehicles a year where these guys are operating at scales of tens of thousands.
And people look at me and go, "Well, how are you ever expecting to compete?" And I'm like, "I know I can compete, I just have to get to scale. I need that bridge to scale." And that is not just unique to me, that's everybody who's working in climate tech. We are asked to compete against industries that have been in place for over a hundred years and we can do it. But the key is we have to get there. We have to be bold in our vision and convince people to come along for the ride in the early years because we know that the real, right? The- the golden fruit is at the end of it and so we just have to get there.
And so policy is the one thing that can help with that bridge. But at the same time, working in emerging markets, I think the one difference that we have compared to places like US, Europe, China, is that our governments are not in a position to be able to support the adoption of this technology in quite the same way. They can create an enabling ecosystem, but things like tax subsidies and things like that, they're just not going to be as powerful here. The governments can't do it. And so international support, but, you know, creating that enabling ecosystem, it helps. It helps us bridge to that scale that we need in order to compete.
Jason Jacobs: And Alex, other than letting you go to the meeting that you're now one minute late for, who do you wanna hear from, how can we be helpful to you?
Alex Roetter: Well, first I would say, I'd obviously wanna hear from entrepreneurs that want to tackle this, that are looking to part- partner with VCs investing in this space that look at software components and some things I mentioned about. The other thing I would say is I'm relatively new to making some fraction of my professional life being climate, I've been concerned about it for a long time. And people often ask me, "Hey, how do I break into it?" And I would say don't be afraid.
Every single amazing person I know has imposter syndrome. Don't worry about imposter syndrome, don't be afraid. There's so many examples of people doing incredible things where before they started doing them, they had never worked in that space before. One thing I'm really encouraged by is by how many people now when they're thinking about what they want to do are running to climate, because they realize it's the most important. It is- it is the test that is going to define this period of human, and not just human, the earth's history.
I mean, what we do here is really we're- we're at a huge really inflection point. So I'm very encouraged by other people getting into that. I would say figure out a way to branch in that makes sense for you. For me, it was going to work on electric flying cars 'cause I had a background in, you know, aviation and software and doing some angel investing, including in areas I knew nothing about like cow emissions and direct air capture and then transitioning that more into my professional full-time investing role.
But I see people from all different verticals just branching in. It could be people with a background in PR that only now want climate companies or branding, or people working on policy. So I think the main thing I wanna see is if you care about this problem, you can break into it. I mean, if I can break into it, you can break into it. Many people have done it. And the most encouraging thing to me is seeing how many smart, passionate, ambitious people are getting into this space and ultimately, that is what's gonna get us out of this mess.
Jason Jacobs: All right. Well, that's a great point to end on. Alex, Jit, thanks so much to both of you for coming on the show and best of luck to each of you on your continued professional journeys and climate journeys.
Alex Roetter: Thanks Jason, this was so fun. Thank you so much for having us.
Jit Bhattacharya: This was awesome, Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note that is .co not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter at Jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers may me say that. Thank you.