We are going to see 10 Tesla-sized companies springing up in the coming years tacking big issues in climate. That’s 10 new companies with a market cap of over $520bn 🏢💪🏻♻️
That’s the big idea of David Helgason, the founder of Unity Technologies, one of the world’s two largest game engine companies, who is now a prominent climate investor through his fund Foobar.
David spoke to us last autumn about the advancements he’s seeing in sustainability and his journey as a founder and investor. David Helgason is the Founder of Unity Technologies, one of the world’s two largest game engine companies.
00:00:02:07 - 00:00:26:03
Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to Crazy Intel. It's not a podcast about big ideas. I'm your host, Michael Stothard, an investor first minute capital. This is a bite sized episode recorded at a Founders Forum event up in Scotland. And I'm speaking to David Helgason, the founder of Unity, one of the world's two game engine giants and now a climate investor.
00:00:27:00 - 00:00:32:21
Speaker 1
I started by asking him what was his one big crazy prediction for the future.
00:00:33:10 - 00:00:57:10
Speaker 2
So this may sound crazy to other people, but I don't think it's crazy at all. So humanity is facing a set of crises generated by global warming and other sort of sustainability crashes, ocean acidification, crashes, crashing of biodiversity and so on. And this is horrible. The good thing is that these set of challenges are attracting some of the best founders in the world.
00:00:57:14 - 00:01:25:18
Speaker 2
You know, serial founders, people who have built incredible things before, and some of the smartest graduates from top universities. And there is no world in which these people are not going to build great, like, world changing companies, because that's what founders like that do. And, you know, just if you look at the car industry, you know, Tesla with 1% market share has built a company worth more than a kind of number of five top other companies or whatever.
00:01:26:03 - 00:01:38:11
Speaker 2
Right. This is the scale of the change that's coming. You know, if you look at the markets, the sectors, you know, it's easy to imagine 8 to 10 Tesla sized companies being created in the next ten years.
00:01:39:00 - 00:01:46:17
Speaker 3
So the prediction is over the next ten years, 8 to 10 Tesla sized companies being created. That's extraordinary.
00:01:46:17 - 00:01:51:09
Speaker 2
So recently, Bill Gates said eight. My team says ten. Maybe it's somewhere between.
00:01:51:17 - 00:02:09:13
Speaker 3
One upmanship on Bill Gates. So where do you think these companies what do you think these companies are going to be going to look like if you had to guess the composition of these eight? Is that going to be one carbon accounting, one new materials, one? You know, what's what's your guess?
00:02:09:19 - 00:02:23:11
Speaker 2
Yes, exactly. And energy. And there may be one or two doing sequestration, sucking carbon from the atmosphere or the oceans. We spot some that we think have have that kind of trajectory ahead of them.
00:02:24:08 - 00:02:26:04
Speaker 3
And so when you.
00:02:26:12 - 00:02:49:01
Speaker 2
Add food and transportation and agriculture and mining, there's a lot of sectors, a lot of old industrial order that is kind of shitty or really shitty. And, you know, people, millennials younger than me, building companies that are going to transform these sectors.