Molly Wood on Journalism to VC, Buzz Out Loud, Podcasting, and Investing in Climate Start-ups

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Seed to Harvest. Today I'm excited to bring Molly Wood, newly minted VC at Launch, leading their climate tech portfolio and searching for startups that have solutions to the climate crisis. She's the co-host of This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis. Previously, she was the host of Marketplace Tech on National Public Radio, creator and co-host of Make Me Smart, and creator and host of How We Survive, a documentary podcast. Molly, thanks so much for coming on today.

Hey Paige, thanks for having me. What a delight.

Of course. Okay, so I wanna start things off with a light question. In my research, I came across a post about why you joined CNET, and you mentioned that you had honed in on CNET because it had the best grammar. And I actually laughed out loud when I saw this because I am a fellow grammar nerd. Uh, so I'd love to hear more about where your love for proper grammar developed.

Grammar nerds unite!

Woo-hoo!

Yeah, I mean, this— so this was the pretty— not the earliest, but the somewhat early days of publications moving online or like popping up and existing only online. It was 1999, and there was just sort of a flood of like websites and new publications that were only online and all digital, and they were just all kind of crappy. And I had started, you know, I've always been a writer. I started in college in creative writing and then went into journalism. And I just am like an English nerd. And so I would see these sites that had typos everywhere and just like totally nonstandard grammar. And I was like, I can't even deal with that. And then I came across CNET and I was like, you people are professional.

That's so funny. I love that. So I've always thought that journalists make really great VCs because you have developed an eye for great stories and storytellers. So how would you describe your approach to investing through that lens?

Yeah, well, I certainly, first of all, hope that's true. The jury's going to be out evidently for 3, 5, or 10 years in the VC world. I won't know for a really long time. I do think it's about creative— it's a really valuable lens, particularly if you have been, you know, I've been a tech journalist for over 20 years and did all of this sort of product evaluation at CNET, at The New York Times, you know, marketplaces where I really got that like MBA, if you will, like that real deep business education. So it's marrying a lot of really useful trends that include some skepticism, some evaluation, and then a sense of kind of context. Like, where does this story fit into all the other stories I've heard? Because if I've heard one like it, then I can probably identify a pattern and get a sense of how this is going to turn out. So I think it's what journalists really do is pattern recognition.

Yeah. So very similar to VC in that you're kind of like, like stack ranking the different stories or companies that you're seeing come in and then comparing them. in the context of the broader market, which I think that context piece is really difficult to get if you're not in it all day. So I'm curious, like speaking of being in it, what specific areas of climate tech are you really interested in investing in or evaluating? What are those patterns that you're picking out so far?

So I have been trying to create a filter for the companies that I want to invest in that I hope will also become a little metrics dashboard Over time, I'm really interested, and I've sort of narrowed it down to 3 funnels. The best companies will fit into all 3. I'm really into gigatons. So solutions that, you know, create an impact at the millions of tons scale instead of the tons of carbon emissions. And that is a high bar, right? But like John Doerr—

I was gonna say, I was gonna ask you to explain what gigatons was.

Yeah, so gigatons are like 1,000 tons of carbon. And so if you look at like in the most recent book, wrote, Bill Gates, the climate change book talks about how we need to, like a simple model for thinking about addressing the climate crisis is that we need to go from 51 gigatons, which is how much carbon we emit per year, to zero. So no big deal, we could do that. So, but it's a super useful framework for evaluating a solution. If somebody comes and they're like, yeah, we can save like 200 tons of carbon a year, I'm like, oh. Okay, well, that's not gonna help because a gigaton is 1,000 pounds of carbon a year, and we need to get to 51, or, you know, we need 51 to come out, or maybe it's a million. Is a gigaton a million? Either way, if you're talking to me about hundreds, it's like we might need a bigger impact than that. So I—

Gotcha. So like scale of the impact is one of your first metrics that you're looking at.

What are the other 2? Scale specifically of the emissions impact. And then in terms of other impact, systems. Are you changing a system, an entire manufacturing system, or the way that people consume groceries, or the way that what we do with trash? Do we turn plastic into— like, I just talked to a company that's actually taking waste streams and fermenting them and turning them into a new kind of protein.

Whoa.

Like flour, like a basically a mushroom-based protein.

That's wild.

That's awesome. That's creating— that's like a whole new system. So it's super interesting that way. And then I'm interested in behavior. So is it a solution that changes consumer behavior, business behavior? Like, we have a comp— one of my companies is in our accelerator right now, and they're doing zero-waste grocery delivery. So if consumers adopt that in large numbers, then we make a massive impact. We get a ton of, like, plastic out of the landfill, and we sort of stop this massively polluting packaging industry. Yeah.

Oh, that's super cool.

Those are like the 3 big filters. And I would love if, you know, in 3, 5, or 10 years I could somehow measure that and like have an impact chart. But that's maybe for year 2. I'm only 5 months in.

Yeah, I started to see some things around probably the year mark, which was April for me. And then you're kind of like, oh, interesting. I see this across disparate aspects of the portfolio. I think that like the founders with really like hustle, resilience, and storytelling ability have definitely seen like great early success. So that's like one of the things that I think about is like the founders beyond those initial filters.

And the founders, definitely. Also, I'm really into like wonky financial tools. I love that stuff. That's like the marketplace in me. I'm just like, oh, are you financializing an aspect of this that could move like trillions of dollars because of incentives that nobody else is aware of? Talk to me.

Yeah, that's awesome. There's a really cool company in our portfolio called Adily that's kind of like Main Street for caregivers. And they basically allow the caregivers that don't take the benefits for like full-time caring for someone, and then they help them them basically fill out all the forms and then just send them the tax benefits, which I think is cool. So I'm also into like wonky financial stuff as well.

Yeah.

Love that stuff.

It's really impactful.

Yeah. And it's so interesting because it's kind of like hiding in plain sight. And it's sometimes you hear about an idea and you're like, whoa, why hasn't anyone else done this? And you're like, oh, it's like hard and a lot of regulation behind it.

So, um, that's why usually.

Yeah. Yeah. So podcasting has been an integral part of your career even before it was cool in quotation marks as early as 2006. So I'm curious, I was telling you before the show, but I'm definitely pretty much a one-person show over here. So how has your creative process shifted as you've gone from CNET to NPR to working with Jason on This Week in Startups?

Yeah, you gotta get a producer. I'll tell you, a producer is the key to life.

Okay. What does a producer do?

The key to life. So the producer is the person who makes sure that the production occurs every day. So you are, you know, so you're the talent here. Let's just, we'll lay out the model in the most old school terms. You're the talent.

Yeah, I wanna hear.

You have the ideas, you're the performer, you know who you wanna talk to, and you have a large, you know, high level sense of what you wanna talk to them about. Then the producer makes all of the mechanics of that happen. They go get the person, they book them, they schedule them. They make sure that they have the technology they need to record properly and that you, Paige, have the technology that you need to record properly. It's very much a caretaker role. But their job is to make sure that when you sit down to start talking to me or whoever else, you're ready, you're prepped, you've got some questions written for you, you've got a package of history for you to look through, and like your technology is working.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, cool. It's like your mom.

I love that. I'm curious, like, yeah, as you've gone through those different organizations, how has the, the support infrastructure around you shifted and how has that contributed to you as a, as a creative, like as a talent?

Yeah, I guess actually that is to answer your question. The thing that has probably changed for me is understanding over time how to be produced and how much that matters. And that like you can, you can do a lot by yourself, obviously. Right. A whole— you're running a fund.

Yeah.

And being a one-woman show podcast, but that, that support actually ultimately makes you be allows you to become more creative, allows you to take risks, and allows you to do better work than you might do on your own. Like, what I really learned was that your audience makes you better, your producers make you better, your team makes you more creative. And so— and also that, like, almost everybody, if you're doing especially like a long-form show like we are, can benefit from a co-host.

Yeah.

I think Jason really feels that now. I know so. He's told me that. And it's like, it just Takes the load off a little bit.

Yeah, I love your dynamic on This Week in Startups. Actually, I didn't, um, have this written down before, but I would love to hear how you and Jason met and how you ended up becoming a co-host on This Week in Startups.

So Jason, Jason and I have known each other for 15 or 16, maybe 17 years. I met Jason in the mid-2000s, and I've told him this story so he knows, in very classic Jason style. We met when he got mad at me on the internet and tried to incite a little bit of a riot against me.

No way.

Oh yeah, he was like upset about something I had written about Weblogs, you know, his network of blogs that he created and changed the entire online journalism industry with. And but Jason is Jason. And so we patched it up over time. He came on our podcast Buzz Out Loud, and over the years Like, I just sort of grew to understand that that's who he is, but that at his core, he's a really good person and you can trust him. Like, you can count on him to do the right thing. And so it— and then I just sort of— I started coming on This Week in Startups as a guest, and we just have been having this kind of rolling conversation for a long time. And then all of it just coincided with, you know, my interest in climate solutions and wanting to just be a little, be direct, like have boots on the ground. Like storytelling's really valuable, but I also was like, I don't have time to change people's minds. We gotta like get in this game for real. So. Yeah.

So you mentioned Buzz Out Loud briefly, but in one of your previous interviews, you mentioned that Buzz Out Loud changed me forever. That show introduced me to the idea and the power of an online community. So for some context for our listeners, Buzz Out Loud was one of the longest running web series online airing from 2005 until its end in 2012. So I'm curious, Molly, how your experience with online communities has shifted since 2013, and then especially what role Twitter may have played in that.

Yeah. Wow. There's so much history there. So yeah, Buzz Out Loud, it was a daily tech news podcast, not dissimilar from This Week in Startups. And it, it really— my co-host Tom Merritt, who I still do a side podcast with, is really the one who made me realize 'Cause I had pretty traditional journalists up into that point. My first job was the Associated Press where you don't even have a byline on your stories. I was ivory tower all the way. And Tom was like, oh no, we gotta be in the forums talking with our audience. We started putting them on the show in the form of voicemails. We had a live chat, again, very similar to Twitch or YouTube. We were doing all this stuff in 2006, 2007, 2005. And I realized that your audience is not like— they're not faceless, but also they're— you're just in a conversation with them, right? They're just as smart as you are. They know more than you do. You can rely on them for additional information that you might not have, and then they'll be with you. Here I am in 2022, and there are Buzz Out Loud fans in the This Week in Startups chat.

Wow, that's wild.

It's incredible. Like, you really build A relationship that I don't think you can build with any other medium. And I have done them all. Like I've done writing and TV and magazines and books and podcasts and, you know, online video and all of that. And podcasting builds the strongest communities by far.

That's so interesting. It's a very intimate act to listen to a podcast. Like I most often listen to them by myself, either in the car, like on a walk, and I'll just be in my own little world admiring the world around me. And then like people's voices will like, Pop into my head and you feel like you're chatting with them or like you're on the phone. It's a very intimate medium.

Yeah.

I found.

And that portability you mentioned, I think is the other thing that's so powerful about it. Like there's no other medium where you can be with somebody wherever they are.

Yeah.

Like on the treadmill, on the bike, on a walk, in the car.

This, I feel like this is gonna be very meta for some people listening, doing those activities.

I know it kind of is. Hey buddy, I hope you're having a great day.

You're doing great. Keep going.

You're doing great.

So as a journalist for the past 20 years, what are some of the compelling story frameworks that you've learned or recognized?

Whew. How long do we have for this? Oh my goodness. The compelling story frameworks. Well, I think what I have learned, and this is some of this is just time, but the best journalism is actually the journalism that uses context really well.

Mm-hmm.

And so understanding that a thing is never happening for the first time, that there's always some version of that story that's existed before, that there's some, you know, it's sort of like history matters. And that we might find ourselves in a moment where we're— it's like short-term versus long-term thinking. You know, we're having an immediate reaction to this thing right now. We think it's always been this way. And it's like, well, actually, Here are all the reasons it has never been this way, or it was this way 50 years ago, but now it's a different way now. I actually think the best stories explain how we got here and put things in that historical context so that you have either hope or a deeper understanding that can actually take out some of the emotion and bring back some of the analysis, or even just help you recognize a pattern. And sometimes it's reassuring to be like, okay, well— This has happened 600 times throughout history. We know we have the tools to survive it. Let's get to work.

That's so interesting. I find there's like an interesting quality of being younger where you're experiencing a lot of things for the first time, and I found that reading a lot of historical fiction actually helped me process some of the things that I thought were unique to my experience. I'm like, oh, people have been experiencing this for like Hundreds of years. And one aspect that I love about historical fiction is they go into people's emotions. So I'm curious what's on your bookshelf or Audible bookshelf if you prefer audiobooks.

Yeah, I could, I could not agree with you more about historical fiction. It's so great because you get both, you know, and it is nice to think about, like you just read this dry history and you don't think about people's feelings and it is really different. So I'm reading, I just finished Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. which is a book all about radical geoengineering concepts and the climate crisis. It also includes, like, feral pigs and Dutch royalty. It's— I mean, it's very, like, Neal Stephenson's got it all. Really good read.

Yeah.

I'm also reading Eat Like a Fish, which is about a commercial fisherman who became a regenerative agriculture farmer.

Whoa.

And I am learning so much about, like, all the potential of the ocean for food and survival and as a carbon sink. It's a really interesting book. And then I love it too 'cause it's got a lot of swearing. Because he was a commercial fisherman. And it's super fascinating. And then I just have been— I don't even know when, but occasionally then I'm also reading this big venture capital textbook. And, you know, I'm sort of just trying to read all the business books. I'm going to look it up on my Kindle right now. It's not because Venture Deals I read.

Right. There's like a big fat one that was like, I forget who it was, maybe Fortune or something, but it's like old from the '90s.

The Business of Venture Capital. From Wiley.

Interesting.

Okay. It is so good. It's so useful. And it's actually, it's a textbook. I mean, it's a $60 book. I mean, it's a full-on textbook.

Yeah.

But it's super just well-written and engaging actually for a textbook. It's really good. And then I'm working my way through The Power Law, that new one that just came out by Sebastian Mallaby.

Ooh, yeah. I just ordered that. It should be arriving today actually. I'm excited to read that one.

Yeah, I think that's gonna be really good. But what I'm gonna read on the plane is Station Eleven.

Okay, cool.

I either read, I just told somebody recently, I only read like nonfiction business books or—

I like a blend of like historical fiction, meta writing books, and then just some like really soapy drama-y books. I feel like you don't learn to drive emotion until you've read a bunch of those. 'Cause I find that a lot of them are very like formulaic, but you're, you're invested even so.

True. Well, okay. Send me your list. What's your, what's on your, what soapy like fiction do I need to get for the plane? 'Cause I do need that escape right now.

Yeah, I think Nora Roberts must have had like— she— I feel like she's like a whole like studio team of writers for the amount that she pushes out. She's cranking out. But I really enjoy her writing. And then Beatrix Williams, she wrote this amazing book called Along the Infinite Sea, and it's a really interesting combination of like modern and historical fiction. It's a multi-generational romance and all of the things like connect over time, which I really love.

Huh.

You're talking about context. It's very like context-rich book. Um, yeah, I'll try it. Okay. So I know we're wrapping up, but I want to hear about who, who've been some of your favorite people to interview on This Week in Startups.

Oh, we have had— I think that the fun ones for me lately have been the ones who are doing something that I'm skeptical of, and then they come on and I'm like, oh, okay. Like we have one coming out in a week or so about the— it's the CEO of the company called Strike, Strike, which of course I love because it's kind of like action, which is, you know, I'm only into like—

I like the emphasis.

I call him Action Jack because the name's Jack. Action Jack of Strike. But it's, it's like he is creating a company that is sort of trying to make Bitcoin actually usable as the currency. He's trying to enable the currency in cryptocurrency, which I came in— Wow.

Right.

And I came in pretty skeptical of. And then the more I talked to him, the more I was like, I don't understand how come this Didn't exist. Why isn't everybody doing this? Isn't this how it's supposed to work? You know, I was like, oh, okay, well, I think I might be kind of sold on that. So I, and then we also did one with Elise McKinnon. Elise, I gotta look, I'd have to look up her name, but she is running, she's a first-time fund manager, was part of the Angel Series. You would have probably been my favorite, but instead it was Elise because she, because again, she's running this fund that's super laser-focused on like The Lightning Network and pieces of the blockchain technology that have nothing to do with like NFTs and Web3. She's just like, nope, I'm just, I'm here with the base layer. And it was really interesting. And then of course, I've been doing This Week in Climate Startups every week. So I'm talking to startup founders and climate investors, and I just am so inspired by the range of things that, that people are doing. It makes you feel really hopeful when you're— one week I've got, you know, a guy who's like, They figured out how to regenerate coral really quickly, and then they're gonna sell like coral restoration as a service. And then, uh, a woman who's running a company that's like, here's how we created a mutual fund so you can divest your 401 from fossil fuels.

Whoa, that's great.

Boom, boom, boom. Super impactful. And so it's just really like, that's where I'm getting all my hope right now is that—

I love that. I love like having a sense of hope and like speaking to founders that are building like big ambitious visions is such a rewarding aspect of Being an investor, I find founders are great, right? Yeah, it's awesome.

It's so great. It's an awesome job.

I got into venture because I started like interviewing musicians, so I was always super curious about the creative process, and I started interviewing more founders. I was like, oh, this is so cool. Like, it's combining all these things that I like. So I'm really going back to my roots with the, the podcasting, um, as are you.

Yep, totally. Honestly, to be a podcaster and an investor is basically the greatest job in the world. I don't know why I didn't do this sooner.

I love that. Okay, so what's one thing that you think any aspiring— I'll switch it up a bit— podcaster can do to set themselves up for career success, even if they're still in school?

I would say, especially if you're an aspiring podcaster, understand who you are and then be honest about that. Podcasting Is an authentic medium. So trying to come up with a voice that's not really yours, trying to fit into a genre that isn't true to your personality is never gonna work. You actually have to sort of lean into who you are. And then depending, again, depending on what you're— if you're doing an interview show, you don't need a co-host.

Mm-hmm.

But if you're just gonna do a daily show and you're not gonna have an interview every day, trust me when I tell you, you don't think you need a co-host, but you do. It will make you better.

I love that. Well, to close this out, Molly, thank you so much for coming on. I had so much fun. I'm excited to see you in person soon. Yay! We're both going to Miami for the All In Summit. I think this is gonna be published after that, so yes, so we will have already hung out.

We'll be nice and tan.

Yes, yes, we will. Where can people find you on the internet if they want to learn more about you and what you're working on?

You can find me on Twitter @MollyWood. All one word, just like Hollywood, both an M. And then my email address is in my Twitter bio. That's how I roll. So if you have a company you think I need to know about or anything I need to know about, send me a note.

Amazing. All right. Thanks so much for tuning in today to Seed to Harvest. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever your favorite podcast listening platform is. I'll be releasing new episodes weekly, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know on Twitter. That's Paige Finn, Paige and then Finn with 3 N's. Thanks, and see you again next week.