Mike Schroepfer, ex-Meta CTO, Gigascale founder
Inflection point of scaling unscalable
Last week, we had the privilege of hosting Mike Schroepfer, who served as CTO of Meta and helped scale the company to billions of users. Then he founded Gigascale Ventures to help scale climate solutions and make the world a better place to live for everyone.
Surprisingly, Mike’s focus shifted during Covid, when he started digging into details of the climate crisis. Mike kept meeting impressive founders working on fascinating technological innovations that had the potential to completely reimagine trillion dollar sectors like energy, industry, agriculture, and transportation. Knowing that the cost curves of enabling technologies like solar panels and lithium ion batteries continue to fall, he could see that we’re on the cusp of a whole new set of economically viable businesses with significant climate impact. He started investing in hopes of helping founders get their solutions to scale faster.
Here are a few key takeaways we gathered:
1. Timing and Cost Curves
Every new technology depends partly on timing and context. The cost curves for many energy technologies are declining rapidly and, in some cases, are already cheaper than fossil-fuel incumbents.
2. Scale of Climate Ventures
You can build successful climate ventures at very different scales—from large-scale projects like geological hydrogen to smaller, cost-effective energy efficiency gadgets.
3. Browsers in the AI Era?
Will browsers continue to exist in the age of AI? It’s uncertain. People still need a user interface, but will it be a browser? Perhaps you just want to check the weather with minimal friction—AI could change how we interact with information.
4. EV Efficiency
Electric vehicles operate at about 92% motor efficiency, whereas gasoline vehicles run at around 12%, thus making the shift unavoidable.
5. Importance of UX
User experience (UX) is key in building successful products. It’s more appealing to have lightweight, stylish glasses that incorporate AR instead of something heavy or cumbersome. Meta’s collaboration with Ray-Ban, for example, is breaking records.
6. China’s EV Dominance
China is excelling in electric vehicles by driving down costs and verticalizing the entire supply chain. This poses a significant challenge for traditional auto manufacturers with more fragmented supply chains.