Formally welcoming three new passionate minds to the 2150 mission.
When we unveiled 2150 almost one year ago, we had already started assembling an outstanding and diverse team of 7 team members with experience across technology, venture capital, company building and the built environment.
Since then, we have been fortunate to have found some amazing intellectually-curious minds with an aligned ambition to use venture capital as the tool to make the world sustainable and resilient through technology. Alexander Kielland had joined us as VP of Operations and Iben Carlsen joined to help the team function at its most efficient.
Today we are proud to formally announce three full-time additions to the team:
Nayreen Akhtar is new-but-not-new. Through our public commitment to diversity, we had joined Diversity.VC and agreed to take on an intern. And lets just say we hit the intern jackpot! Nayreen joined us with experience at Rothschild and BGC Partners. She has an amazing work ethic, a natural enthusiasm for sustainable technologies and an amazing sense of empathy that has already influenced the culture of the team. It was therefore a very easy decision to ask her to join us full-time. Follow Nayreen on Twitter where she flip-flops between Climate Tech and her other passion, crypto, and who is trying to make #greenlasereyes go viral.
Margarita Skarkou joined the 2150 investment team from Barclay’s Sustainable Impact Capital and was formerly a founding member of Barclays Ventures. Hailing from a Greek island, Margarita has always had a natural passion for nature and sustainability and is not afraid to share how the challenges of her childhood allowed her to take on, and thrive, in the City. Margarita is an engineer by background and her first job was in construction sites in Paris, so it is not by chance that she has a strong passion for driving sustainability into the built world. Most importantly, the day she received her offer letter, Margarita received some other amazing news, and she will be upgrading her title to “Mom” in the coming weeks. You can follow her on Twitter where she will hopefully share her latest reads from her always growing and impressive bookshelf.
The most recent addition to the team is Peter Hirsch, who joins us as Head of Sustainability. Peter’s role will be to apply rigorous analysis to the sustainability potential of the investments we pursue (we are already calling this the “Peter filter”) and to then work with investments to measure, track and report their impact metrics. We spent a lot of time looking for the right person for this role. Someone who lived and loved LCA analysis, who could discerns the difference between each of the IPCC scenarios, and who also had the intellectual curiosity to learn and understand technologies as varied as the chemistry of concrete and AI for infrastructure. We were fortunate to meet Peter and convince him VC was the right next step for his career. Peter has just joined Twitter (so a follow would be nice), but it is not be the best medium to be able to hear his booming voice and sarcastic wit with his Pennsylvanian-American accent describing the necessary tools to be Paris-aligned.
We are so fortunate to have been able to find these amazing minds. We care about diversity, but just as importantly, we care about neurodiversity, and by that we mean different ways of thinking, different paradigms, different mental models that help us all look at opportunities jointly and then support our portfolio companies in the best possible way. On broader diversity metrics our team is now 42% female and 33% ethnic minorities and we know that this early investment into our culture will only allow us to improve on these metrics in the future.
Formally welcoming Nayreen, Margarita and Peter to the team and looking forward to finding the next few mission-aligned intellectually-curious minds wishing to join us on this critical expedition.
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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
