Robin Teurlings - Managing Partner at Zero Emissions Fund

Welcome to another VC Wisdom Podcast. We have Robin Terlings with us. He's an investor, mentor, lecturer, entrepreneur. He's building Zero Emissions Fund, was previously the— or still is, I think— the founder and CEO of Startup Buddy. So Robin, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Like you already said a little bit, my LinkedIn profile is pretty complete. So I'm an entrepreneur of a company in Singapore called The Startup Buddy, and my main work nowadays is on the Zero Emissions Fund, which is a family fund investing in climate, energy, and sustainability tech innovations.

Interesting. And how did you start out in life? I think you started out as a consultant at Accenture, Capgemini, right? Classic start.

Yeah, well, actually, actually, I have to give credit to my first boss. So I did start in consulting, but for a very tiny firm in the Netherlands. It was called BCNO, and it was 5 people, so nobody will know it. But he actually taught me how to do stuff like that. So, but you're right, my first job after my master's was at Accenture. So I did consulting mostly for energy and public sector customers. And then, yeah, I moved around a couple of consulting jobs. Then I went to ING, worked there for a couple of years. And then I started my own business when I moved to Singapore in 2015.

Got it. Why did you move to Singapore?

Mainly adventure. I had been to— I'd gone to China in 1997, and that probably still is the most life-changing trip I've done. It was strange, like nobody spoke English yet at the time. I couldn't read anything, like it was super hard to get around. Obviously, we didn't have smartphones yet. So initially, I didn't like the trip. trip, but then I kind of got the hang of how to talk with my hands. And it was so fantastic and it was so entirely different from where I came from that basically from that moment I had the dream to live in Asia at some point. And we just kept postponing, postponing, postponing. And then at some point we were like, you know, there's always going to be a reason not to go. Let's just go. And that's what we did. And it was obviously not China, but it was in the right direction. So that's how we ended up in Singapore.

Interesting. And yes, Singapore was already growing very fast back then, right? Was like also where most Asian startups went if they went for some funding. How did that change your trajectory and your understanding of startups and the ecosystem of venture capital?

Well, I was very lucky in the sense that I came to Singapore in 2015. And that was just around the time that the government really started pushing for a startup ecosystem and a startup culture. They set something up which is now quite famous called Block 71, which is like an entire area in the city where all the startups are concentrated in 20 buildings, something like that. And everything was very nascent, like it was very new. So It was super cool because you could meet like the RedMart guys. RedMart is like an online e-commerce platform that got successful. We ran into the Stripe guys that came over to Singapore. At the time, everybody was just walking around and there was no difference between me being by myself and the guys already having a few thousand people. Over time, obviously, that's changed a lot, Like now the ecosystem is pretty huge in terms of investment in startups, etc. So I would say it's pretty close to where Silicon Valley nowadays is, obviously smaller, but like similar mentality. But I kind of got to grow up with that wave basically. So yeah, that was really cool.

Right. And do you find yourself more as a founder or as an investor nowadays?

Both, first of all. I mean, I started in Singapore as a founder, but I had been investing already for a very long time. I started investing when I was 13. So that's— I'm 49 years old now. So, but investing has always been something that I did on the side next to my work. And only the past 2 or 3 years, I actually started doing investing more professionally.

Yeah.

Uh, and stepping away from the entrepreneurship part, I would say I'm an entrepreneurial investor, um, like very much a hybrid, I guess.

Okay, so you run your companies, you have like cash cows like the Startup Buddy, I guess. You take that capital and you invest in, uh, some founders you're bullish about that you meet through either your business or the ecosystems of founders and VCs you're part of?

Initially, that's, that's how it went. Yeah, before I started focusing on the Zero Emissions Fund, that's, that's how I approached it. But now it's actually quite the other way around. I focus mostly on investing. We invest very specifically in climate, energy, and sustainability tech. But to your point, I definitely do use my network and all the people I know from the Startup Buddy And yeah, they complement each other. Before, the focus was the startup body and sometimes investing. Now it's investing and sometimes the startup body.

So tell me about Zero Emissions Fund, right? And is the environment or green tech still as popular as it was like 5, 10 years ago nowadays?

Well, to answer the first— the last question first, it's not as popular as 5 years ago, but I think that's just how it goes. Like, things go like this, right? So in my mind, it's not possible that we get the trend up again. I don't know when exactly, but I'm 100% sure we will go up at some point. Partly because I don't think we have a choice. As an investor, it's actually pretty good to be in an industry that's not at peak because it's very expensive, makes a lot of work quite a little bit more difficult. I also think it hugely depends where in the world you are, what your perspective is. I get to teach quite a lot about green technology, sustainability, Also for financial institutions, for example. And it's not as popular as in 2021 when every investor was investing in climate tech, definitely not. But it's also definitely not the case that it's gone. Like, there's so many people in different parts of the world working on new innovations in this field. The amount of capital is just growing, but it's actually more institutional capital. So the mix has changed, but I don't think the momentum has gone.

Yeah, okay. And is your startup buddy company still active? I mean, it's been 10 years, like, how do you balance both, right?

Well, it's a slightly painful question. We are still active, but very much only on the side. We sometimes still do a program. I mentor people a little bit. It's very minimal, but we are literally tomorrow switching off the platform itself. So we had a software platform which we called an accelerator, online accelerator. We had 5,000 members on that learning how to build companies. Basically a software as a service model. Fortunately, a couple of years ago, we already noticed that's what's going to be tough with the whole AI wave. So we have been building, ramping that down. I'm not sure if that's correct English. And we are literally switching that off tomorrow. So yes, I'm still working on StartupBuddy a little bit, but not like how it's been.

Okay, and why exactly are you shutting it down? Like, what will you replace your cash flow with, like your cash cow type of company?

Well, first of all, like I said, my focus is on Zero Emissions Fund. So we are actually doing also this week probably our first investment as the Zero Emissions Fund as part of the program that we've been running over the past year. We are making revenue from that also, and we're obviously looking to make an upside on the investments that we are doing there. The reason we're shutting it off, like one of the things that, for example, our platform was really good at was education. We had a lot of schools that were teaching their students about entrepreneurship using our platform. At the time, we were great at that. It was a gamified platform that worked really well in terms of getting them enthusiastic about it. But the reality is similar to you, I suppose, that now if I want to know something, I go to ChatGPT or Gemini, I ask the question, and it's just lower barrier, quicker, and we cannot really compete with that anymore.

Right. And your first investments in zero emissions funds, like, what's the check size? What's the specific startups that you're aiming for? Who do you raise for? Tell us a bit more.

Sure. So we are a family fund and we invest with our own money, meaning that we are very flexible within the limitations that we have. Typically, we invest anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000 depending on what type of company and how enthusiastic we are about it. What we tell the companies that we work with is that they shouldn't come to us primarily to fill their rounds because we probably can't, but because we work together with a large network of investors that are equally interested in climate tech— sorry— and sustainability like we are. I cannot tell you yet which company we're going to invest in because we're in negotiations, but they are the top 3 of the program that we ran over the past year. So those companies are companies like Plastic2Green, which is a plastic recycling company, CPTI, which is a solar panel company, solar energy company, and Einstedt, which is a methane abatement company. So that's the kind of companies that we look at. And for the program, we invest maximum $100,000 for the program as a whole. So depending on how many companies we fund, it's a fraction of that or that entire amount.

Right. So about 10 companies a year and the check size is what, $50,000 to—

Sorry, no, no, we'll do— okay, so the program is for an entire year. Maybe to give you— we ran it for the first time this year. We had 250 applications. We do it in phases. We have 3 phases. The first one is very similar to your typical accelerator, which is starting up. The second phase is growth. So the companies have to show growth within a period of 3 months. And the final one is investment. We started with 250 applications. We had 133 companies in the first phase. That phase, we don't do a lot of selection. Basically, they have to be in climate tech, energy, or sustainability. Then we have a cutoff point. We look, are they at TRL 5 or higher, or do they have revenue or other kind of credible traction? So we went into phase 2 with 33 companies, and 17 finished. That phase. And now for the final phase, we are doing due diligence on 3 companies. So it's not a pitching program. You don't finish with pitching, you finish with a check.

Check size is 5 to 100 grand from what I read.

Okay.

Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Only European founders?

Oh no. Sorry to say no all the time. So, No, we, like I said, we had 17 companies finishing the phase 2 and we had a closed demo day with them only for investors that were supporting the program. Those were from 13 companies— countries, sorry, not companies, countries. And those were from US, Israel, Switzerland, Germany, Ukraine, Malaysia, all over basically.

Okay, interesting. And which ones were the most successful ones? You have like success stories so far?

Well, like I said, so we're doing due diligence on 3 at the moment, which are our 3 favorites for our fund. We share that due diligence with the group of investors that was there during the Demo Day and that's been supporting the program. so that hopefully they co-invest. Ideally, we have as much investment in those companies as possible. Those companies, like I said, they are Plastic2Green, Einstad, and CPTI. Yeah, if you want to know more details about the companies, I'm happy to.

Yeah, well, you also worked with a bunch of startups in the last decades, right? Like, do you have success stories of Startups you invested in or participated or mentored that went to the moon?

Yeah, a company that I tend to always bring up simply because it's been the longest and I just started out, so I've seen them grow for the longest, is a company called YQ. It's a company in Singapore. By now it's not so well known because they have a very large shareholder and operate under their name. Delivery Hero. But what they do is, um, I don't know if you've ever been to Singapore, but if you have, there's something very specific about Singapore which is called hawker culture. Everywhere around Singapore you will find sort of food courts, but much more traditional than what you would consider a food court in the US, for example. And that's basically what virtually anybody in Singapore at least eats once a day. Um, the food is super cheap, so the standard models of, let's say, Foodpanda or Delivery Hero don't work there because the food is like $4 or $5. If you would put like $2 delivery on that, that doesn't work. So they came up with like a very good delivery system of pooling food for lunch and then bringing it to big office buildings. And that's been very successful. They spread that out from Singapore to Malaysia and other countries as well. It's a super local idea, but yeah, put together in a very smart way by 2 very good founders. And I think I got involved like 6 weeks in. So yeah, I've been able to see that entire trajectory basically.

What's your strength as a mentor for founders that come to you?

Well, one strength I would suppose is I'm very clear and direct about my feedback. Like, I don't try to be political about it. I don't keep in mind what other agendas I might want to have. I don't think it's fair to them. I don't think it's useful for me either. So usually I figure out very, very quickly if there even is a connection between us and if that's a long-term one or a short-term one. From there, I've seen so many companies since I went to Singapore since 2015 in every sector in way too many countries in Yeah, all kinds of stages. I'm never a specialist, like I cannot tell them how to do the perfect marketing. If that's what they are looking for, they should look for a marketing specialist. But on a founder level, like I'm looking broadly at the company, what do we need to do in the next 1 or 2 or 3 years? I tend to be able to help them a lot better than What are your main goals for this year?

What do you want to accomplish?

We are running Cohort 2 for the Zero Emissions Fund. We're kicking that off end of October. We basically want it to be larger, more successful, get more investments from other investors than we have so far. Hopefully also find some first use cases from corporates that the startups can work with. That was an ambition that we had for the first round, but that so far we didn't manage to make successful. So what we would like to do is like a lot of the companies that we have in the program are technology-driven companies, and they usually to get to the next technological stage need to be able to do a demo project with like a larger customer. That's difficult and it takes longer time. And we've come close, but we haven't been able to entirely get that happen in the first cohort yet. So maybe that would be great if we can do that in the second cohort.

Nice, man. Well, Robin, thanks for being on. Where can people find out more about you?

Go to LinkedIn, look for Robin Terlings or Zero Emissions Fund. And, uh, you can find everything about me. I do use LinkedIn a lot. I know some people never go there, but I use it all the time. So that's also where you reach me the easiest.

There you go. So I was Robin and Charles for another VC Wisdom Pod.