Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. In this episode I talk to Josh Romisher, co-founder and CEO of Holocene. Holocene invests in African pre-…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Jakob Bitner, co-founder and CEO of VoltStorage. Jakob co-founded VoltStorage s…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Caitlin Wale, the founder of Kinjani. This conversation takes us back to the Af…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Natalia Dorfman, founder and CEO of Kita. Kita is an insurance start-up from th…

Hallo und herzlich willkommen zum Tech and Trees Podcast. Mein Name ist Pascal Mies und wie immer geht es heute darum, wie wir bessere ClimateTech Start-Ups bauen und wie wir schneller mehr von ihnen auf die Straße bringen können. Ganz konkret geht es heute darum, wie ClimateTechs erfahrene Führungskräfte gewinnen können, wann das überhaupt Sinn ma…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to Casper Rasmussen, Co-Founder of Monta. This company from Copenhagen has built a…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to learn about how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. On this episode I talk to William Pelton, Co-Founder and CEO of Phytoform. Phytoform is a British Climate…

On this episode I talk to Florian Hildebrand, Co-Founder and CEO of Greenlyte Carbon Technologies. Greenlyte is direct air capture company that draws down carbon from the air while producing hydrogen. They have raised ten million in capital and want to grow as fast as Tesla did. Ambitious goals but if we want to fight climate change we need people …

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to ClimateTech founders, investors and operators to find out how we build better ClimateTech companies and how we build more of them faster. In this episode I talk to George Darrah, a principal at the ClimateTech-VC Systemiq Capital. George has a pa…

This time I spoke to Timur Sirman, co-founder of Magnotherm. Magnotherm is a German company that developed a magnetic cooling technology that is vastly more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than fluid-based cooling systems. By bringing this cooling technology to for example super markets Magnotherm plans to cut the energy usage and emi…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and today I am starting a new season of Tech and Trees. After leaving Africa I took a little pause to reflect on what I wanted to do next and what I wanted to learn about. However, in the end everything will still be about the questions of how do we build better ClimateTech and…

This time I spoke to Jit Bhattacharya, Founder and CEO of the Kenyan electric bus company BasiGo. He is one of those people with whom I do not know where to start asking questions. Jit has spent significant time in Silicon Valley working on battery systems, then moving on to Apple, then building one of the biggest solar business in Africa, moving o…

Having spent the past year on the African continent, I am now in the final stages of this series of African guests. This time I am talking to the economics professor and economic historian Johan Fourie. He is something like the South African Noah Yuval Harari whom most people know for his book Sapiens - A short history of mankind. Johan wrote a boo…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees Podcast. My name is Pascal Mies and on Tech and Trees I talk to Climate-Tech Founders, Operators, Investors and Academics who get me smarter on how to build better climate-tech companies. This time I spoke to Martin Freimüller, Founder of Octavia Carbon - Kenya’s first ever Direct Air Capture Company. Martin …

I have started to dive a bit more into the DeepTech-Space and what it takes to build such a venture. Last time, I tried to cover how to start a biotech venture as a business guy. Well, this time I approach the topic from the other side. I want to understand how a deeptech business is run on the science-side. My guest is Leah Bessa, co-founder and c…

Among all the start-ups out there, DeepTech-ventures are the most interesting to me and so I want to make an effort to interview more people who are building something really really hard. As a guy with a business background, I want to understand how to start these type of ventures without having a scientific background. My guest this time is Tasnee…

Last time I talked to Romain Diaz Satgana, a venture capitalist who invests in climate-focused companies in Africa. This time I talk to one of the founders who was too good for Romain to pass on and compelled him to invest.. My guest is Jesse Forrester, Founder and CEO of Mazi Mobility. Jesse is building an electric motorcycle company out of Nairob…

My guest today is Romain Diaz, the founder and managing partner of the climate-tech VC Satgana. In the past year one climate fund after another has been raised in Europe but Satgana is special due to their geographical focus: They invest in Europe and Africa alike. Romain spent several years as an entrepreneur and venture builder on the African con…

Hello and welcome to the Tech and Trees Podcast - What are the big shifts that technology will bring about on the African continent? I spoke to the most active venture capitalist on the continent about the trends he sees. Zachariah George and his fund “Launch Africa” have made 133 investments across 22 countries over the past 2 ½ years, so he is on…

Sometimes you start an episode and you have a good feeling right away. When I started talking to Shobhita Soor I had this feeling. She gave off a great positive vibe during our conversation which I feel stemmed from her conviction regarding her mission: making protein insufficiency and inaccessibility in West Africa a thing of the past. She does so…

The people I get to interview on Tech and Trees are different every time and all of them have different stories to share. Yet, I feel that this one turned out to be more personal than others. I talk to Armand Bam, the head of social impact at the Stellenbosch Business School. He oversees their efforts to make education more inclusive and labels him…

In this episode I am talking to Joost Boeles - A Dutchie turned start-up founder in Kenya. When I got introduced to Joost, I struggled a bit with the question of how does his business makes sense? Joost has co-founded the first e-Bike assembler in East Africa and sells them to businesses and individuals via subscription. So, Joost got told by a lot…

Building a start-up is hard. Building a start-up in South Africa is harder. To help ease the pain and assist founders in their journey accelerators are setting up shop all over the African continent. One of the most successful ones is the LaunchLab in Stellenbosch. What makes them unique is: They are not jumping on the bandwagon of investing in Afr…

In Today’s episode I am talking to Michael Maas. This interview was recorded a while back but it was special for me: It was the first time I got to interview someone in person rather than via video call. While it made me a bit more nervous as I could not hide behind my screen it was also a fantastic experience. Remote does the job but being face-to…

Hello and welcome to the tech and trees podcast. I paused the show for six months. I was living in South Africa. When live around you is loud and there is a lot to see, it is worth it to focus and decrease your own output. Now, that I am back in Europe, I want to share the impressions I gathered in South Africa. To that end, I am starting an Africa…