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Climate justice and environmental ethics in tech, with Amazon engineer Rajit Iftikhar
Nearly 8,000 Amazon employees, many in prestigious engineering and design roles, have recently signed a petition calling on Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors to dramatically shift the giant company’s approach to climate change.
By deploying a kind of corporate social disobedience such as speaking out dramatically at shareholders meetings, and by engaging in a variety of community organizing tactics, the “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” group has quickly become a leading example of a growing trend in the tech world: tech employees banding together to take strong ethical stances in defiance of their powerful employers.
The public actions taken by these employees and groups have been covered widely by the news media. For my TechCrunch series on the ethics of technology, however, I wanted to better understand what participating actively in this campaign has been like some of the individuals involved.
How are employees in high-pressure jobs balancing their professional roles and responsibilities with being actively, publicly in defiance of their employers on a high-profile issue? How do leaders in these efforts explain the philosophy underlying their ethical stance? And how likely are their ideas to spread throughout Amazon and beyond – perhaps particularly among younger tech workers?
I recently spoke with a handful of the Amazon employees most actively involved in the Employees for Climate Justice campaign, all of whom inspired me– in similar and different ways. Below is the first of two interviews I’ll publish here. This one is with Rajit Iftikhar, a young software engineer from New York who moved to Seattle to work for Amazon after earning his Bachelor’s of Engineering in Computer Science from Cornell in 2016.
Rajit Iftikhar
Rajit struck me as a humble and precociously wise young man who could be a role model — though he seems to have little interest in singling himself out that way — for thousands of other software engineers and technologists at Amazon and beyond.
Greg Epstein: Your personal story has been key to your organizing with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Can you start by saying a bit about why?
Rajit Iftikhar: A lot of why I care about climate justice is informed by me having parents from another country that is going to be very adversely affected by [climate change]. Countries like Bangladesh are going to suffer some of the worst consequences from climate change, because of where the country’s located, and the fact that it doesn’t have the resources to adapt.
Bangladesh is already feeling the effects of climate crisis; it is much harder for people to live in the rural areas, [people are] being forced into the cities. Then you have the cyclones that the climate crisis is going to bring, and rising sea levels and flooding.
So, my background [emphasizes, for me] how unjust our emissions are in causing all these problems for people in other countries. And even for communities of color within our country who are going to be disproportionately impacted by the emissions that largely richer people [cause].
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‘Weirdo’ Fintech VC Anthemis marches to its own drummer
Entering into the world of Anthemis is a bit like stepping into the frame of a Wes Anderson film. Eclectic, offbeat people situated in colorful interiors? Check. A muse in the form of a renowned British-Venezuelan economist? Check. A design-forward media platform to provoke deep thought? Check. An annual summer retreat ensconced in the French Alps? Bien sûr.
Sitting atop this most unusual fintech(ish) VC is its ponytailed founder and chairman Sean Park, whose difficult-to-place accent and Philosophy professor aura belie his extensive fixed income capital markets experience. He’s joined by founder and CEO Amy Nauiokas, who in addition to being one of Fintech’s most prominent female investors also owns a high-minded film and television production company.
When Arman Tabatabai and I recently sat down with Park and Nauiokas in their New York office, the firm’s leaders were in an upbeat mood, having blown past the temporary perception-setback associated with the abrupt resignation last year of Anthemis’ former CEO Nadeem Shaikh (for more on this, read TechCrunch writer Steve O’Hear’s coverage of the situation).
And as the conversation below demonstrates, Park and Nauiokas are well poised to bring the quirk into everything they touch, which these days runs the gamut from backing companies involved in sustainable finance, advancing their home-grown media platform and preparing a soon-to-be-announced initiative elevating female entrepreneurs.
Gregg Schoenberg: With the two of you now at the helm, how does Anthemis present itself today?
Sean Park: I’ll step back and say that when Amy and I were working at big financial institutions in the noughties, we saw that the industry was going to change and that existing business models were running into their natural diminishing returns.
We tried to bring some new ideas to the organizations we were working in, but we each had epiphany moments when we realized that big organizations weren’t built to do disruptive transformation — for bad reasons, but also good reasons, too.
GS: Let’s fast forward to today, where you have several strong Fintech VCs out there. But unlike others, Anthemis puts weirdness at the heart of its model.
Yes, you’ve backed some big names like Betterment and eToro, but you’ve done other things that are farther afield. What’s the underlying thesis that supports that?
Amy Nauiokas: Whatever we do at Anthemis has to be a non-zero-sum game. It has to be for good, not for evil. So that means that we aren’t looking in any place where you see predatory opportunities to make money.
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Fintech and cleantech… an odd couple or a perfect marriage?
The Valley’s rocky history with cleantech investing has been well-documented.
Startups focused on non-emitting-generation resources were once lauded as the next big cash cow, but the sector’s hype quickly got away from reality.
Complex underlying science, severe capital intensity, slow-moving customers and high-cost business models outside the comfort zones of typical venture capital ultimately caused a swath of venture-backed companies and investors in the cleantech boom to fall flat.
Yet, decarbonization and sustainability are issues that only seem to grow more dire and more galvanizing for founders and investors by the day, and more company builders are searching for new ways to promote environmental resilience.
While funding for cleantech startups can be hard to find nowadays, over time we’ve seen cleantech startups shift down the stack away from hardware-focused generation plays toward vertical-focused downstream software.
A far cry from past waves of venture-backed energy startups, the downstream cleantech companies offered more familiar technology with more familiar business models, geared toward more recognizable verticals and end users. Now, investors from less traditional cleantech backgrounds are coming out of the woodwork to take a swing at the energy space.
An emerging group of non-traditional investors getting involved in the clean energy space are those traditionally focused on fintech, such as New York and Europe-based venture firm Anthemis — a financial services-focused team that recently sat down with our fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg and I (check out the full meat of the conversation on Extra Crunch).
The tie between cleantech startups and fintech investors may seem tenuous at first thought. However, financial services have long played a significant role in the energy sector and is now becoming a more common end customer for energy startups focused on operations, management and analytics platforms, thus creating real opportunity for fintech investors to offer differentiated value.
Finance powering the world?
Though the conversation around energy resources and decarbonization often focuses on politics, a significant portion of decisions made in the energy generation business is driven by pure economics — is it cheaper to run X resource relative to resources Y and Z at a given point in time? Based on bid prices for request for proposals (RFPs) in a specific market and the cost-competitiveness of certain resources, will a developer be able to hit their targeted rate of return if they build, buy or operate a certain type of generation asset?
Alternative generation sources like wind, solid oxide fuel cells or large-scale or even rooftop solar have reached more competitive cost levels — in many parts of the U.S., wind and solar are in fact often the cheapest form of generation for power providers to run.
Thus as renewable resources have grown more cost competitive, more infrastructure developers and other new entrants have been emptying their wallets to buy up or build renewable assets like large-scale solar or wind farms, with the American Council on Renewable Energy even forecasting cumulative private investment in renewable energy possibly reaching up to $1 trillion in the U.S. by 2030.
A major and swelling set of renewable energy sources are now led by financial types looking for tools and platforms to better understand the operating and financial performance of their assets, in order to better maximize their return profile in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Therefore, fintech-focused venture firms with financial service pedigrees, like Anthemis, now find themselves in pole position when it comes to understanding cleantech startup customers, how they make purchase decisions, and what they’re looking for in a product.
In certain cases, fintech firms can even offer significant insight into shaping the efficacy of a product offering. For example, Anthemis portfolio company kWh Analytics provides a risk management and analytics platform for solar investors and operators that helps break down production, financial analysis and portfolio performance.
For platforms like kWh analytics, fintech-focused firms can better understand the value proposition offered and help platforms understand how their technology can mechanically influence rates of return or otherwise.
The financial service customers for clean energy-related platforms extends past just private equity firms. Platforms have been and are being built around energy trading, renewable energy financing (think financing for rooftop solar) or the surrounding insurance market for assets.
When speaking with several of Anthemis’ cleantech portfolio companies, founders emphasized the value of having a fintech investor on board that not only knows the customer in these cases, but that also has a deep understanding of the broader financial ecosystem that surrounds energy assets.
Founders and firms seem to be realizing that various arms of financial services are playing growing roles when it comes to the development and access to clean energy resources.
By offering platforms and surrounding infrastructure that can improve the ease of operations for the growing number of finance-driven operators or can improve the actual financial performance of energy resources, companies can influence the fight for environmental sustainability by accelerating the development and adoption of cleaner resources.
Ultimately, a massive number of energy decisions are made by financial services firms and fintech firms may often know the customers and products of downstream cleantech startups more than most. And while the financial services sector has often been labeled as dirty by some, the vital role it can play in the future of sustainable energy offers the industry a real chance to clean up its image.
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Angaza Raises $4M To Make Clean Energy Affordable For World’s Poorest
Often, off-grid rural villages in places like Africa have their electricity generated by energy devices, like solar panels and batteries, donated by non-profit organizations and charities. The problem, however is that model is not sustainable and relies of yet more charitable hand-outs. What’s required is to make clean energy scale in self-supporting way. Luckily the rise of the mobile… Read More
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Business Models For Sustainable Electricity
As varied as the quirky spectrum of people dressed from t-shirts and shorts to suits and ties at SXSW Eco in Austin was the spectrum of sustainability topics covered — from improving fashion’s supply chain to building transportation hyperloops. For the first time ever, though, the workhorse of energy sustainability, the electric grid, was also tackled as a focal point. Read More
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SolarCity Acquires Silevo To Become A Large-Scale Solar Panel Producer
Elon Musk’s SolarCity has acquired Silevo, a solar panel manufacturing and design firm that produces low-cost, high-output photovoltaic cells, the company announced today. The deal will help SolarCity “achieve a breakthrough” in solar power pricing thanks to “massive economies of scale,” according to a blog post on the SolarCity website.
Already, the company is… Read More
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