Quaise Energy

Like many others, I am on a continuous journey to align my investing with broader outcomes I would like to see in the world.  

I am not convinced by the arguments for ESG investing in public markets (prior piece on that here), but I do believe investing in startups that have a stated purpose other than just maximizing shareholder returns can provide positive societal impact and positive returns (my argument for that here).

Stewarding Earth's resources for future generations, and in particular finding ways to produce clean, reliable energy at scale, is one of those goals for me.

I started research on new investment areas in climate change last year -  developing a reading list initially through Twitter and the great writing widely available.  Bill Gates' book How To Avoid a Climate Disaster and Jason Jacobs' My Climate Journey are two rich sources that open many threads to pursue.  

Around the same time, I came across several articles from Eli Dourado. Initially, I found Eli's work through several of my favorite newsletters, Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution and Matt Clifford's Thoughts in Between. Both are must reads for me every week.

So, when I saw Eli tweet that he was going to start a Syndicate on Angelist in March, I was immediately interested.  In May, Eli and Patrick has a terrific conversation on  Invest Like the Best, which demonstrated Eli's thoughtfulness on a wide range of important topics.  

At that time, I dove into his writing, going back over a decade on his blog. I can't overstate how great it was to be able to get to know a thinker like Eli through his writing - reading the analysis and perspective on my own time, and watching his world view develop over a sustained period of time.  

In July, Eli wrote about geothermal energy (a post also highlighted by Tyler Cowen in his newsletter as well).   Geothermal had come up several times in broader reports I was reading, including the Lawrence Livermore report on Getting California to Neutral emissions.  But, Eli's post was the single most interesting analysis I had seen for the potential of geothermal for sustainable, clean and scalable geothermal energy.

This all came together when Eli sent around his first opportunity for investment in his syndicate in October in a leading geothermal production company, Quaise Energy. The investment memo fit squarely in the thesis Eli had been writing about previously, providing a compelling argument to me for participating.  

I'm excited to be an investor in Eli's first syndicate, and hope there will be many more to come with a similar long term focus.  More on Quaise Energy here.