As we set out to build 2150, we were humble enough to know that there were a lot of things that we did not know and that our own team would never be big enough to cover all the bases. Venture Capital, after all, is about envisioning and supporting the future, and the technologies that will power that future might not yet even have emerged.
So we set about bringing together a group of brilliant minds who could join our mission to make the world of 2150 a reality. We sought out individuals who spend their time thinking about the future of cities, the technologies and science that will power them, the sustainability that will be required of them and the policy that will drive them. Above all we wanted to curate a group of intellectually curious peers who also wanted to learn from one another.
Our Advisory Board is meant to be an extension of our team: supporting our deal flow, evaluating the technological, commercial and sustainability potential of companies we seek to back, and mentoring our founders through their experience and network. The 2150 Advisory Board includes:
World-famous architect Bjarke Ingels, the founder of BIG, who designs the future urban landscapes with sustainability at the core. As he said in his TEDx talk “Architects have to become more than just designers of two-dimensional facades or three-dimensional architectural objects, they have to become the designers of ecosystems: systems of both ecology and economy that channel not only the flow of people through our cities and buildings, but also resources like heat, energy, waste and water.”
Renowned urbanist and academic, Richard Florida, well-known for his vision of urban regeneration. When asked recently about the future of cities after the pandemic, Richard told Foreign Policy “ Cities have been the epicenters of infectious disease since the time of Gilgamesh, and they have always bounced back — often stronger than before… Predictions of the death of cities always follow shocks like this one. But urbanization has always been a greater force than infectious disease.”
Christine Harada served as the Chief Sustainability Officer under the Obama administration, where she was able to lower the Federal Government’s greenhouse gas emissions by 18% and energy consumption by 23%. The US Federal government controls “360,000 buildings, a fleet of 650,000 vehicles and $445 billion annually in purchased goods and services” so she has truly driven sustainability at scale.
As the founder of award-winning sustainable building developer, EDGE, Coen van Oostrom has long been a public advocate of the real-estate industry in driving sustainability. In an open letter in response to the EU’s Green New Deal he stated “It is time for the industry to do their part and take responsibility to make this deal work for the world as it should…If we can show the way from a European standpoint, taking a stand where we can, the world has a lead to follow with no more excuses or procrastination.”
Scientist, professor and entrepreneur Dr. Lynn Loo serves as the Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton. The Center is a “multidisciplinary research and education center, whose singular mission is to develop technologies and solutions to secure our energy and environmental future.” During her most recent annual letter she stated “As economies are rebuilding from the impacts of COVID-19, and as communities are… healing from social and environmental injustices, we now have an opportunity to redesign policies, tools, institutions, and technologies to solve the problems at hand.”
As one of the global leading authorities on reinforcement learning, Danny Lange has had an illustrious career leading AI teams at Amazon, Uber and now Unity. On AI and sustainability, Danny has said “We are often focused on the risks and the problems, but there are also pretty impressive things in the area of using, say, computer vision to equip systems with the ability to see things…So there are a lot of these technologies that can make our world greener, more sustainable.”
Having served as Special Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, Daniel Korski is the founder and CEO of govtech incubator and policy group PUBLIC. Recent research on Cleantech by PUBLIC stated “Whilst technology is not a silver bullet for climate action, adoption and investment in CleanTech startups should be a crucial part of the government’s plan to reboot the economy, reach NetZero targets and take a leading role on the international stage for tackling climate challenges.”
Jeremy Oppenheim established McKinsey’s sustainability practice before co-founding SYSTEMIQ a sustainability advisory and investment firm. When asked why he co-founded SYSTEMIQ he responded “I used to be of the persuasion that a sensible model of well-managed market economic development could get us to where we need to get to. Now, I don’t think we can get there with an evolutionary model, [with] a bit of good policy here and a bit more markets there . . . Today, there is a need for a really big dose of structural transformation.”
A successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, founder of Benchmark Europe and investor in iconic companies such as Spotify and Ynsect, Eric Archambeau is not slowing down. He has recently launched a new $325m VC firm, Astanor Ventures, which focused on food and biodiversity. On the alignment of profit and purpose, Eric was quoted as saying “For the first time, we have the perfect alignment between impact creation and financial creation and integration.”
We are thankful to all the Advisory Board members for their time, their intellect and their joint experiences at the service of 2150’s mission and entrepreneurs. We look forward to learning with them and alongside them in the years to come.
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2150 is a venture capital firm investing in technology companies that seek to sustainably reimagine and reshape the urban environment. 2150’s investment thesis focuses on major unsolved problems across what it calls the ‘Urban Stack’, which comprises every element of the built environment, from the way our cities are designed, constructed and powered, to the way people live, work and are cared for. Find out more at www.2150.vc
