Giant Ideas

Giant Ventures is a multi stage venture fund, co-founded by Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen. This episode was recorded live at an event we hosted with McKinsey for Europe’s top 100 climate leaders. Asking the questions for us here is Pilita Clark, an editor and columnist at The Financial Times. Today on the show, we are joined by Greg Jackson, founder and CEO of Octopus Energy. You might think of Octopus as the UK’s leading green energy retailer. And you’d be right, Octopus has leapfrogged deep-pocketed legacy companies to become the UK’s second biggest energy supplier, having scaled to almost 8M households in just 9 years. They have also acquired nine energy companies across Europe and the US. ...But you’d only be half right. Octopus is much more than an energy retailer. It’s one of the most ambitious climate tech companies globally. Octopus is in 15 countries, they offer electric car leasing, electric car charging, heat pump manufacturing, and licences its internal operating system, Kraken, to enable other green energy retailers to support over 54M customers around the world. Based in London, Octopus is now worth almost $8 billion. It’s a huge climate success story touching many of the foundational parts of the clean energy stack. Alongside our institutional investors, Giant is very fortunate to be backed by a group of successful technology founders, including Greg. He’s an amazing guy with an amazing life story. He was raised by a single mum in the north of England who struggled with every energy bill and Greg left school at 16 to earn money as a programmer. He’s built businesses ever since, culminating in the creation of Octopus.They talk about the origins of the startup, the grand vision, why he believes oil companies days’ are numbered, and when Octopus might go public. Enjoy the episode!Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Read more about Giant Ventures here.

Today on the podcast we have Tom Blomfield - founder of not one but two UK unicorns - Monzo and GoCardless. We asked Tom on the show to give the inside story on what it takes to found a multi-billion dollar business - the character traits but also the sacrifices. Are there consistent characteristics that unite leading founders, and ultimately is the struggle worth it?To say scaling Monzo has been challenging would be an understatement. From its messy origin emerging from a competitor, to convincing regulators to allow a 29 year old run to a bank, to dealing with the highs and lows of an intrusive British Press, forging Monzo from nothing has been extremely tough.Tom is incredibly open about the toll Monzo took on his mental health. He ultimately left in 2021 to become a prolific angel investor - seeing entrepreneurship from the other side of the table. We co-invest with Tom regularly and have loved working with him as a product-focused board member for our portfolio company Kapu. He recently moved to San Francisco to join Y Combinator as a Group Partner. There are a few people in the world better positioned than Tom Blomfield to identify what it takes to create a technology giant from scratch.

Giant Ventures is a multi stage venture fund, co-founded by Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen. We recorded these first episodes at our live Giant Ideas summit, held at London’s Tate Modern. The Giant Ideas summit brings together 200 founders, CEOs, heads of state and other leaders to explore how we can harness cutting edge technology as a force for good. Today we bring you an interview with the founder of Calm, Michael Acton Smith.With over 100m downloads, Calm has become one of the most influential mental wellness products in the world. As proud investors in the company, we were thrilled to welcome Michael to Giant Ideas in conversation with Wilfred Frost from Sky News to explore why it is still Day 1 for mental health. They talk about why Calm’s domain name was so important, the role of AI in expanding mental health support, and the potential for psychedelics to reduce suffering.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Read more about Giant Ventures here.

Giant Ventures is a multi stage venture fund, co-founded by Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen. We recorded these first episodes at our live Giant Ideas summit, held at London’s Tate Modern. The Giant Ideas summit brings together 200 founders, CEOs, heads of state and other leaders to explore how we can harness cutting edge technology as a force for good. Today on the podcast we have a conversation on the future of climate tech between Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett, and OVO founder Stephen Fitzpatrick.In little over a decade Stephen has built OVO into one of the UK’s largest utilities, providing clean energy to 4.5 million customers. As if OVO wasn’t enough to keep him busy, Stephen is also the founder of Vertical Aerospace, which aims to decarbonise air travel with electrically powered vertical take-off and landing aircrafts.In this conversation, Stephen discusses why he thinks flying taxis will change how we move between cities, whether he thinks small modular reactors can play a big role in the energy mix, and why he thinks the last 5% of getting net zero will be the most painful.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Building or investing in purpose driven companies? Read more about Giant Ventures here.

Giant Ventures is a multi stage venture fund, founded by Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen. We recorded these first episodes at our live Giant Ideas summit, held at London’s Tate Modern. The Giant Ideas summit brings together 200 founders, CEOs, heads of state and other leaders to explore how we can harness cutting edge technology as a force for good. Today we bring you an interview with Nathan Blecharczyk, the co-founder of Airbnb. Airbnb is one of the biggest technology success stories of the last 20 years and, at the time of recording, they have a market cap of 90 billion dollars.Airbnb is the ultimate ‘Giant Idea’: when they started the idea of staying in a stranger’s home was unthinkable, and 14 years later they’ve had over a billion stays. But it didn’t begin with a grand vision and there were plenty of false starts. In this interview, Nathan talks about the power of purpose, and specifically how Airbnb’s values helped them survive a series of crises including a racism scandal involving hosts, guests trashing apartments, and losing 80% of their revenue in 8 weeks during the pandemic. Asking the questions here at the Giant Ideas summit was CNBC and Sky News anchor, Wilfred Frost.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Building or investing in purpose driven companies? Read more about Giant Ventures here.

Giant Ventures is a multi stage venture fund, founded by Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen. We recorded these first episodes at our live Giant Ideas summit, held at London’s Tate Modern. The Giant Ideas summit brings together 200 founders, CEOs, heads of state and other leaders to explore how we can harness cutting edge technology as a force for good. Today we bring you an interview with John Browne. Lord Browne is the former CEO of BP and now one of the world’s most prominent climate tech investors. He has served on the boards of Goldman Sachs, Intel, DaimlerChrysler, and SmithKline Beecham.John joined BP out of university and rose up the ranks to become CEO between 1995 - 2007. He turned BP from a former national oil company into the world’s third biggest corporation. He is widely regarded as one of the top CEOs ever to emerge from the UK. Two years into his tenure as BP CEO, John was accused of “leaving the church” by fellow Big Oil executives after a landmark speech at Stanford in 1997 in which he acknowledged that climate change was manmade and called for action.These words may be uncontroversial now, but in 1997 they were both brave and very important.Today John is the Founding Chairman of BeyondNetZero, a multibillion dollar climate fund launched with General Atlantic.John has been an influential advisory board member at Giant Ventures since we started the firm. He and I previously wrote a book together, Connect: How companies succeed by engaging radically with society.In this conversation with FT columnist and author Gillian Tett, John provides a state of the union on climate change, 25 years on from his historic Stanford speech. They cover everything from climate finance and carbon markets to the role of oil and gas companies in decarbonisation. The episode was recorded shortly before the UN COP climate talks - so you will hear John and Gillian debate the UAE’s controversial role as COP host.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Building or investing in purpose driven companies? Read more about Giant Ventures here.

Giant Ventures is a multi stage venture fund, founded by Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen. We recorded these first episodes at our live Giant Ideas summit, held at London’s Tate Modern. The Giant Ideas summit brings together 200 founders, CEOs, heads of state and other leaders to explore how we can harness cutting edge technology as a force for good. Today we bring you Ida Tin on the future of femtech. There are perhaps few more qualified to talk on the topic of Femtech than Ida - who in fact coined the term 'Femtech' in 2016. Ida is the co-founder and former CEO of menstruation-tracking app, Clue - which she originally designed to track her own cycle in the absence of any technical solutions. Clue now has 11 million users across 190 countries.In this talk, Ida discusses why Femtech matters, what today’s definition includes, why there is still a woeful response to technology for menopause and hormone tracking and why we need to keep listening to women when they tell us which problems really matter. It’s an inspiring call to action.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Building or investing in purpose driven companies? Read more about Giant Ventures here.

Giant Ventures is a multi stage venture fund, founded by Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen. We recorded these first episodes at our live Giant Ideas summit, held at London’s Tate Modern. The Giant Ideas summit brings together 200 founders, CEOs, heads of state and other leaders to explore how we can harness cutting edge technology as a force for good. Today we bring you our interview with Mustafa Suleyman on the coming wave of AI. Mustafa is right up there as one of the most influential technologists of our time. As the founder of DeepMind - now owned by Google - he created one of the two dominant forces in AI alongside OpenAI. He’s just raised +$1BN for his new company, Inflection AI. And he’s written arguably the most important book of 2023, The Coming Wave which explores the enormous opportunities and risks of the technology he pioneered.There are some very profound ideas from Mustafa in this conversation. Although he’s clear that AI has the potential for very serious harm - and governments need to hire people who really understand technology - he genuinely believes AI will deliver what he calls an ‘era of radical abundance’. He thinks we’re entering the most productive decades in the history of humanity, with seismically cheaper energy and food.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.Building or investing in purpose driven companies? Read more about Giant Ventures here.