This is the S2G Podcast, where we talk to business leaders, investors, policymakers, and thought leaders who have a transformative vision for the future. We’ll explore how their experiences and perspectives offer lessons into scaling the food, agriculture, oceans, and energy transitions.
Subscribe:.rss.atom.json.md.m3u.pls
Live Last read · last published · next check
Saves to your Listen queue, to pick up on another day or another device.
Every investor in long-duration, capital-intensive sectors eventually faces the same question: what do you do when the exit markets close and your companies still need years of funding? Keith Crandell answered it the hard way. His firm, ARCH Venture Partners, started as a University of Chicago experiment with a $9 million fund that took 15 months to raise, then hit biotech's "nuclear winter,"…
At S2G, we believe the best returns over the next 30 years won't come from crowded deals, but from building the financial infrastructure for businesses that don't fit traditional funding categories. But how do you finance a business that doesn't fit into any box the capital markets recognize? Paul Lisiak has built a career and a $1.8 billion firm, doing exactly that. Recorded live at this year's…
Farmers today are in a tough spot. With input costs climbing and crop prices falling, many farm businesses are barely breaking even, yet they still have very little insight into one of the most important parts of their operation: the soil. And it's not just growers who want this information. CPG companies, carbon accounting firms, and anyone trying to understand what's happening below the surface…
Big change only happens when someone tells a story people can believe in, and few people tell stories about the world better than Fareed Zakaria, bestselling author, The Washington Post columnist, and CNN host. In this episode, Fareed joins S2G’s Sanjeev Krishnan and Frédéric Michel, strategic advisor to Lupa Systems and former chief strategy and communications advisor to Emmanuel Macron, to…
On paper, capital is pouring into the energy transition. But where is it actually going? In this episode, Sanjeev Krishnan sits down with S2G Managing Director Francis O'Sullivan to unpack his new paper, "The Illusion of Crowds," a five-year, data-driven look at how $88 billion across 6,400+ deals has really been deployed, and why the market is far more concentrated than the headline numbers…
The old playbook built on cheap capital, globalization, and asset-light software is breaking down, and Sanjeev Krishnan thinks most investors haven't fully registered what may come next. In this episode, fresh off S2G's ninth annual Summit and the close of Solutions Fund I at $1B, Tonya Bakritzes sits down with Sanjeev to unpack the five secular forces he believes are reshaping the global economy…
When a ship needs to reroute around the Strait of Hormuz, when forecasters try to predict short and long-term weather, or when scientists model the impacts of a changing climate, it all comes down to ocean data. Yet the ocean remains one of the most undermeasured environments on Earth. In this episode, Chuck Templeton sits down with Tim Janssen, co-founder and CEO of Sofar Ocean, to explore why…
American farming is under real pressure. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent synthetic fertilizer prices spiking, and 70% of US farmers say they can't afford the inputs they need for this planting season. But this isn't just a recent shock. Farm margins have been shrinking for years, and the US has lost almost 150,000 farms in the last five years alone. The commodity model that defined…
This episode will change the way you see American manufacturing and showcase why it's both more vulnerable and more adaptable than you may think. Saman Farid, CEO and founder of Formic, sits down with Chuck Templeton to pull back the curtain on a pressure point hiding in plain sight: hundreds of thousands of U.S. factories are running behind schedule or turning down orders, not because they lack…
Gas prices at the pump are just the beginning of what the war with Iran means for global energy. In this episode, Sanjeev Krishnan sits down with S2G's energy co-leads Frank O'Sullivan and Bala Nagarajan to unpack what the war in Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz actually mean for the global energy system, not just this week, but over the next decade. From gas shortages hitting stoves…