Dr Renard Siew, Climate Change Advisor, Centre For Governance and Political Studies Kuala Lumpur and ideaXme Climate Change ambassador, interviews Frans Nauta, founder ClimateLaunchpad and Climate-KIC Accelerator.
Climate-KIC Accelerator is the world’s largest support program for clean-tech startups. Over its 8 years of operation it has supported more than 1.500 startups, that have raised over 1,5 B€ in follow on funding.
ClimateLaunchpad, the focus of this interview, is the world’s largest green business ideas competition. It operates in 60 countries and has supported more than 3.000 teams.
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:00:08] Welcome, everybody again to another episode of the show, a show that showcases the profiles of humans behind the really big ideas that are ‘shaping our world for the better’. My name is Renard Siew, and I am the climate change ambassador for ideaXme. Today, we have a very special guest. Mr. Frans Nauta, who is the founder of the ClimateLaunchpad initiative, one of the world’s largest accelerator programmes for clean-tech business ideas. They span more than 53 countries and have trained more than 1,400 start-ups this year. Welcome, Mr. Nauta!
Frans Nauta: [00:00:49] Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
Journey To The Climate Space
Frans Nauta: [00:00:52] Mr. Nauta to kick start things, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get started in the climate change space?
Frans Nauta: [00:01:03] Yeah, I’m a little older than you. So, when I was 18, the big issue in Europe was acidification of forests. We weren’t talking about climate change in those days yet. So, I decided I was going to study that.
Frans Nauta: [00:01:19] So, I went to a university in the Netherlands called Wageningen University where they had the first university that had an environmental technology class study. From there I’ve worked in local government at the Environmental Agency of Amsterdam at the National Ministry of the Environment in the Netherlands.
Frans Nauta: [00:01:41] And then I must admit, I got a little bored by the environment and by the especially by the sort of negative tone of people that work in the environment like they the like. I saw lots of improvement, for instance, in air quality. And somehow the people that are worried about the environment always are worried, even though there’s improvement. So, I moved on a bit to innovation.
EIT Climate-KIC Accelerator
Frans Nauta: [00:02:07] I worked at the Prime Minister’s office for 3 years in the Netherlands as the innovation secretary. I set up my own think tank called Knowledge Land. And then about 10 years ago, I moved back into the environment space. But then the big theme was climate change. And I became a part of the founding team of the EIT Climate-KIC which is a European program on climate change. And within that program, I became responsible for all the entrepreneurship activities. So, I set up the Climate-KIC accelerator, which by now has had about 1500 teams in its program. They got funding, they got coaching, and they now have altogether gotten 1.5 Billion in follow on funding. And I started ClimateLaunchpad, which is how you found me, which is for the early idea stages.
Frans Nauta: [00:03:00] So, when people are considering: Should I start a company doing something about climate change? that’s why we had ClimateLaunchpad. ClimateLaunchpad is now in almost 60 countries. About 3 thousand teams that have been gone through the whole thing. It been incredibly fun. And one of the big surprises has been that there are literally entrepreneurs everywhere that would like to work on climate change. So, a lot of my work is helping people with that dream of trying to start a company that does something good in the world and that is specifically to address climate change.
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:03:39] Yeah, I mean, that’s very interesting and really amazing work, I guess just to expand a little bit on that launch pad, perhaps you can share with us, some of your proudest moments in the journey that you have had with the ClimateLaunchpad?
Proudest Moments At ClimateLaunchpad
Frans Nauta: [00:03:58] If you set up something like ClimateLaunchpad and also the Climate-KIC accelerator you’re the coach, right? You’re not you’re not the entrepreneur. But when the coach is happy when the team does really well, or when players of the team do really well. Some of my happiest moments were actually this summer I received an email from someone I trained 2015 in Iceland. His name is John. John was already retired when he entered the program. So, many people think when you think about entrepreneurship, it’s people in their 20s and everything is hip and flashy. But this was someone who worked as a professional career and the aluminium smelter industry. And it’s a pretty big industry in Iceland. And when he retired, he thought he could improve the carbon footprint of this industry. So, I think you need to know the way we make aluminium now is basically it’s a battery process. So, you do have aluminium oxide and you put a current through it to get the oxygen from the aluminium. The question is, where is the oxygen go and the process worked with graphite. So, basically you burn the graphite, which produces enormous amounts of CO2, of course, and that’s how we get pure aluminium. And of course, the electricity in Iceland is mostly green because it’s geothermal.
Frans Nauta: [00:05:26] So, that is ok. But the problem left is to have a better process for getting the oxygen of the aluminium. So, John worked on that. He clearly knew the industry. He had a very hard time in the training because, he was challenging me constantly. But he won second prize that year when we had the finals. So, that was a very pretty cool. And I got an email from him with a picture and a press release where he made his first block of aluminium and probably about the size of a phone. What was cool about the pictures he was offering this first zero carbon aluminium block to the President of Iceland? So, it shows his team with the President. And so, we had a phone conversation about how we have been doing the past 5 years. It’s just so great. It’s the same when you’re like a teacher and you see your students later in life do really well. So, those are always my proudest moments when I’ve helped people in the early stages and sometimes in the later stages be successful. So, John is an example of that.
Frans Nauta: [00:06:41] Another company that was part of the Climate-KIC accelerator were two flying drone companies from Germany, one is Lilium and the other is Volocopter. Both are doing incredibly well. They have both over 100 million in funding in euros. And I bought tickets, for the first flight when it starts its service for me and my wife. That was a pretty good moment and also very cool this year I got actually on my desk here. I got tado – this product (points to product). I don’t know if you know tado, it’s like nest. It’s like a smart thermostat. This one is quite strong in Europe. This one controls your AC, but you also have one for your heating. And I literally have that in my house now, so I remember them vividly in 2012, they came into the German part of the program and now 8 years later, they’re multi, multi-million Euro company. And I can actually buy their stuff. And it’s in my house. And it also definitely does what it promises. So, it promised, stuff will get greener, you will save on energy, and I’m literally saving on energy. So, yeah, all those things are really good and very happy moments.
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:08:02] That’s really, really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. And what would you say are the important qualities to be a successful climate entrepreneur?
[00:08:22] Not different from other entrepreneurs. My favourite definition of an entrepreneur is, of entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled. So, the pursuit of opportunity without regard to the recent resources you really have right now? This is not my definition. It’s from a Professor Howard Stevenson, Harvard University, who came out with it in the 80s. And he was doing research into entrepreneurs, which in the 80s were considered crazy people. So, it used to be mental institutions and now we call them incubators. That was sort of in the 80s. You were kind of nuts if you started a company because life inside these large companies was really good. In his research, his hypothesis was that the people that started companies were the people who were sort of had a very high need for excitement and risk. These would be the type of people that would prefer to do bungee jumping without a rope, sort of. And what he found in his research was actually the opposite. So, it turned out that the entrepreneurs were really good at managing risk. And they were more much more risk managers than risk seekers.Frans Nauta: [00:09:44] So what you need as an entrepreneur is lots of energy because it’s hard and it’s not hard in the way that an education hard where you go really deep because you need to be skilful in many things, like you need expertise on a certain subject, but you also need very good empathy, like you need to be a very good listener. People tend to talk about entrepreneurs, as being like pitchers. I don’t believe that so much. I’ve seen success with really good listeners that really understand their customers. You need to be really skilful in language. You need to be convincing. If you selling to a large company, you’re not only selling to one person, you’re saying to the CEO, but also to the director of sales, and you’re selling to the experts in the R&D department and you need to take them all with you in the sales process, in their own language. So, you need to be willing basically to fail and be OK with that. And then you need a little luck. I’ve seen wonderful ideas fail. I’ve seen ideas succeed that I saw first and thought, what a terrible idea. Like literally the team I mentioned from the volocopter that basically they build a flying drone that transport humans. And I saw that early prototypes and it looked terrible. But they look worse than the Wright Brothers plane. And you think, well, how can this be a market? This is these are crazy Germans that we should not allow them to do this. But, yeah, here they are. They got over 100 million in funding. And I just bought a ticket to be one of their early customers.
Frans Nauta: [00:11:30] So, yeah, you do need a little luck. But I’d say in inspiration, in the idea, like believe in the idea that you can do this. And then very good human skills, like good listening, not so much to the ego that shows up. I’m not a fan of Elon Musk, for instance, I do think Tesla does amazing things, but he sort of just like Steve Jobs, he becomes is this rude personality that many people think this is how an entrepreneur should be. And the ones that I see, yeah, they do have a drive, but actually they are better listeners than talkers in general. The ones that I seem like are the better performance, it seems.
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:12:15] One of the things that you mentioned earlier about being willing to fail and getting back on your feet. I’m just interested to know whether any barriers are challenges in your initial launch of the ClimateLaunchpad initiative. And how did you personally overcome them?
Entrepreneurial Spirit Sparked
Frans Nauta: [00:12:42] I was already shameless by then, I would say. I’m not from an entrepreneurial family. I never considered myself to be an entrepreneur. But when I was in my early twenties, I was a summer for work in the US and I ran out of money. And this is was the 80s. So, you didn’t have Internet phone calls were like 3 dollars a minute to Europe. My parents weren’t home, so I couldn’t call them to wire money. So, I was in New York without money. And I remember vividly walking over Ninth Avenue and I just walked into every restaurant that I could find just to see if they would hire me. And number 20 hired me. And that’s how I sort of survived the holiday. And from then on, I’ve become really good and just asking people: Can I work with you? I mentioned I worked at the Prime Minister’s office. I consider that job a failure. It was quite painful. I got the lead in a very high-profile government program that basically was not successful. If you look at it, a few things happened, but it wasn’t close to what I wanted to achieve. And there were very nasty articles written about me in the media. And that’s all very helpful because what you learn is that you don’t die when something goes wrong. If you would have asked me as a 20-year-old, well, would you survive three weeks in a row, a nasty column about you that people that 350 thousand people read each weekend? I probably would have said, well, it’s going to be hard.
ClimateLaunchpad Was An Accident
Frans Nauta: [00:14:24] As it turns out, you know, you’re fine. So, by the time I started ClimateLaunchpad, I already had enough scratches and scar tissue to not be bothered by failure. And that the funny thing about ClimateLaunchpad is it was never meant to be this big. So, ClimateLaunchpad was a complete accident. We stumbled into what was clearly an interest, but it was actually meant to be a little marketing thingy that we were going to do one year. So, it started as marketing for a program that we ran the Climate-KIC accelerator to get ideas from other countries, in addition to the 6 countries where we were operating. So, we came up with it in April, and thought: Wouldn’t it be nice if we would have more teams from, let’s say, Spain, Italy and a few other things where we didn’t have operations? Yes, good idea. OK, Facebook campaign. But one afternoon brainstorming, as someone said: Why don’t we do a competition and we basically we can use the juries also as a selection, so we don’t have to do an extra selection – efficient. Sounds good. And then we got a person who managed it called Sarah who completely dove into it. She made it a wonderful thing. In October we were done. So, we came up with it in April and by October we were finished. And we thought we should do this more often. And so, then we sort of arrange some money to do it again the year after. And then suddenly we got all these emails from people and countries saying, well, can we join like. Yeah, yeah, sure. And then we got like the second year, it was 20 countries, the third year was 30 countries. In the beginning it was not supposed to be big. And by the time we got to 30 countries that were like, oh, we could also just decide that the goal is to make it big. And that’s how we got to 60. But the reason it was successful was not because of some beautiful vision or like a strong drive. We just stumbled into what turned out to be an interest from people all over the planet to sort of be involved with entrepreneurship and also to sort of as a country like for instance, we also run in Malaysia. The people in Malaysia that are working on climate change are always fighting the good fight in an environment that’s not always supportive. So, to be part of something globally that is working on it, it helps you validate and you’re working on something meaningful. So, it became sort of a community of people that want to work on this. You could call it a sort of global entrepreneurs’ community of people who want to solve climate change. We never planned for it to be big.
Important Mentors for Frans Nauta
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:17:20] It is like a movement that seems to be picking up across the world for sure. And I think one of the key features in ClimateLaunchpad, as well as this great mentorship program that you have, where you bring in experts to sort of provide feedback and ideas for interested start-up participants. I was curious to know if in your life, like, is there someone that you look up to as a mentor? And if you could share a little bit about that.
Frans Nauta: [00:17:55] I was really lucky. The first two people I worked for were inspirational. One was the deputy mayor of Amsterdam. I was in my early 20s. I sort of stepped into a three-month gig to help him and quit my studies for a while. And then the three months turned into a year. And then after that, I was recruited basically by the director of the Environmental Department of the city of Amsterdam. So, it took a while before I got back into my studies and they were both very unusual people. I would say they were a little crazy. So, the deputy mayor couldn’t be a politician now, because he almost stuttered like he was really not good in media, but he had such a wonderful brain. In any discussion, he would always successfully lift the level of the discussion and get everybody engaged in conversation and sort of thinking, well, OK, it’s nice that we’re working on this problem, but could we make it even better? He smoked so much and then those days you could still smoke inside offices, so we were all sitting in this blue smoke. Yeah, it’s such a unique personality, but such like such a bright mind. So, it was so inspiring to work with him and see that what happens in a group of civil servants, because basically we would always meet with civil servants from different types of staff. He was doing urban planning at traffic, public transportation, that type of work. And in every meeting, he would basically challenge everybody to come up with better solutions.
Frans Nauta: [00:19:46] So, there was work done. There were proposals. And he was like, I’m OK with what you suggest, but could we bring it even further? So, that that was amazing to work with him. And so, my second boss was the director of the Environmental Department. He was just fearless. So, if you worked in government, you know, people tend to look at government as like a homogenous bureaucracy, but that’s not what it is. People are actually fighting nonstop inside governments. There is the environmental department fighting with the traffic people. There are the economic people fighting with the environmental people like that. Or you see between political parties, you partly see also inside government. And he trained me basically to be fearless. So, I once ended up in a fight with people of the traffic department. And it was highly political because it was going to be a referendum. And I was very young. I was probably twenty-three. And I was working with people twice my age. They were they were all in their mid-forties. So, I was always intimidated by how old they are, how young I was. But in this meeting, I just stuck to my ground and I said no and I’m going to do it the way you propose it. We as environmental department need to keep our autonomy when it’s about the environmental data, blah, blah, blah. Something complicated doesn’t even matter that much. And the director of Transportation and Traffic was furious, and he basically kicked me out of the meeting.
Frans Nauta: [00:21:15] And then the next day it was before mobile phone. So, I couldn’t send a message to my director saying, look, I got in a fight with this guy. You have a meeting with him tomorrow be prepared. He knew nothing. The next morning, my director goes meet the director of Traffic. And I wasn’t there, of course, but something must have happened that where the director of traffic was furious at me. And I was like, God, this might cost me my job, you know, because this was a really big shot at city hall. So, the environmental directive came back to the office in the afternoon and he said, come with me to his office. And I’m like, oh, God, oh, God. And it closes the door, they say. He said: “Close the door”. I thought the worst. And then he started smiling, said, oh, God, you did so well. I’ve never seen this traffic guy so angry. And I said: “What did you say?” He said, Well, you know, if he has a problem with you, he has to come to me because you’re working on my behalf. And, you know, if he has a problem with you, then he should talk to me and shouldn’t fight with you. And that sort of gave me the trust that this person will always have my back, always have your back. And of course, all my colleagues from then on knew, that this director would always have their backs. The loyalty and energy created in the group of young policymakers was amazing. So, those two I’ll never forget.
Are We Making Progress In The Fight Against Climate Change?
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:22:46] Well, thank you very much for sharing that. We all know that the climate crisis, as some would say, is the defining issue of our generation. Scientists have warned that we only have a dozen years left to cut temperatures from increasing by one point five degrees. Do you personally feel that we are making progress in this space? And if not, what’s on your wish list? And what would you like to see happen?
Frans Nauta: [00:23:15] We’re making amazing progress, stunning, honestly, if you look at it. So, I already told you that I studied environmental technology. The first paper that we had to write that we had to pick what was called alternative energy source in those days and see if it could scale.
Solar And Wind Energy
[00:23:36] I was part of a group that picked wind energy and we needed we did an analysis of the potential of wind energy to become a major contributor to the electricity grid. And this was nineteen eighty-five. Ninety eighty-six. And we did our homework. There was no way that wind energy ever was going to be cost competitive with coal, with gas. And look where we are now. This is like, how long is this ago? Thirty-five years later, wind is the cheapest form of energy in probably more than half of the world. When I was working at the Environmental Department of Amsterdam, we ran a pilot with an electric car. It was a Volkswagen Passat. And it had been tweaked by a Swiss engineering company called ABB. They put in a battery, made it electric. And it was a fantastic car, like, honestly was surprisingly good. And we got a student we hired a student to drive around all the important decision makers of the city of Amsterdam and all the businesspeople to show them this could be the future. But when the project was almost finished, I had a meeting with the people from ABB and they explained to me how expensive that car was and just a battery that was in that car was two hundred fifty thousand EURO’s.Frans Nauta: [00:25:01] So, like, you know, this is 92/93. It was clearly impossible to ever get a technology like that into the hands of the consumers because nobody could afford a car like that, it was impossible. And yet here we are. It is 2020 in Europe, probably cars, electric cars are cost competitive now compared lifetime cost. But even if you buy them now, normally in a store like it’s going down very rapidly and five years from now, there’s no question you will be a stupid person if you buy a car with “an engine that does explosions in it”. So, the progress has been stunning. In all honesty, if you had asked me 30 years ago: Do you see a future where solar is cheaper than coal? No way of course. So rapid transformation that we’re in encouraging. Is it going fast enough? Well, of course not. But that’s like the Formula One driver complaining that the car should always be faster. I’m actually pretty impressed by the speed that we have. Also, I think from both sun, wind, electric cars, batteries have shown our political leaders that there is a huge economic opportunity here, where the environment used to be something that was expensive. It is now actually profitable and, you know, it helps your economy. So, the tone of the discussion and the sort of the wording is completely changed. We’re now talking clearly about the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
Frans Nauta: [00:26:45] Only idiots think that that is not true. I would not want to be where Denmark is a country of five million people, six million people, and they’re still the leading producer of wind turbines in the world like that seems a pretty good deal to me. So, the opportunity is clearly there. The only thing that where it’s lacking, I see a disconnect between sort of the IPCC reports and where the policy is going when it’s about innovation. So, if you look at the IPCC report today, they basically say, well, you know, electricity mostly covered. And if you think about it, that’s actually not what the IPCC report says. That’s what I say. And basically, inside that know the green energy industry well. And it should go faster, but 30 years from now, you know, there’s not going to be that much coal around and gas and all that stuff, we’ve got alternatives for that that are better, that are cheaper. What we don’t have yet is a good strategy for all the other stuff we do with oil and what we do, for instance, in industrial processes where we need very high temperatures. So, that’s where, for instance, hydrogen comes in, or where special applications of electricity come in. And what is easy when you are at the IPCC is that you say, well, it needs to go down this much. And we think with this technology.
Frans Nauta: [00:28:15] So, in all the scenarios of the IPCC, there’s a drop in CO2 levels because we are taking carbon into the atmosphere and doing something with it. We put it in reservoirs, or we make new products out of them. Now, if you want that 10 years from now at any scale, what I would need right now is thousands of start-ups working on it. All right, so we all understand that by the time Google becomes a household name, it’s already 10 years down the road. You Google started in ninety-seven and by 2007, they were like a big company. If I need to capture a lot of CO2 to make, for instance, synthetic kerosene or to make plastics or whatever we want to make with the CO2 that we catch, or you want to drop it in some though I find it super unattractive to simply put it in storage somewhere. I don’t see the use of that at all. But worst-case scenario, we store it well in order to have that technology available in companies that can operate a good business. You need to have companies working on it now, and what I’ve seen in all the programs that I’ve managed through Climate-KIC accelerator and ClimateLaunchpad accelerated I’ve seen hundreds of these companies, and they all have the same pattern. They all turn into zombies. They don’t die. They don’t live.
[00:29:44] They run on government subsidies and they don’t attract customers because the product is simply too expensive. There’s no market for their product because there’s no real market for their product. And they don’t get investors behind them in the tens of millions of euros that you need to scale a company. Because why would you as an investor? Because there is no deal here. There’s no there’s no business to be made. And then you can say, well, those investors, you know, they should think more about the planet. Well, maybe they should. But, you know, it’s your pension money. It’s my pension money. We put that money in the hands of the investors because we want our pensions guaranteed, you know, so it’s not really a fair request towards the investors, like lose our money. Basically, that would be the message to the investors that go green but don’t make money. Well, there’s a consequence. Pensions are in trouble. So, this is the puzzle that needs to be solved. I think so far, the challenges that come after greening electricity and greening mobility, which we’re on our road of doing and doing quite successfully, I’d say. And yes, it could be faster, and I want that. But the basic problem solved. If you want the other problems to be solved, you need to do the same thing that happened with wind and solar and electric cars, which is somebody has to make it a market. And there’s a few ways you can do this. So, one way to create a market is to say, as national government of Denmark, well, if you build a wind turbine, we’re going to sponsor the part of the electricity that’s too expensive.Frans Nauta: [00:31:23] So basically, we cover the cost difference between what immature technology costs compared to the normal grid price. And that’s how you create a market where it becomes gave for investors. The Germans did it. So, they did it not only for wind, they also did it for solar. And you would be guaranteed for 20 years a payback based on the production of electricity either through your wind turbines or your solar cells. So, they’ve created artificial markets. You pay a high price at the start and because the industry becomes bigger, it learns prices, go down and then the subsidies can go down. And that’s where we are now. Denmark paid for the R&D that was needed to get wind turbines to scale. Germany did that same thing for solar, together with China. So, China at one point decided we want to be the powerhouse that produces these solar cells and solar panels. So, China also subsidizes some of that cost reduction. For electric cars, it was California, Norway, the Netherlands that subsidized in all kinds of ways the introduction of electric cars. In the Netherlands I believe we have the highest density of charging stations and charging stations cost money that you barely make money out of them. So, that’s a key thing that you need if you want to go to electric cars, there’s, of course, subsidies for buying these cars in many countries. All these are instruments to make sure that when a technology is not cheap enough, but you can see it getting cheaper over time that you can do so, you create an artificial market.
CO2, the Biggest Business Opportunity In Climate Change Business
Frans Nauta: [00:33:06] I don’t really see that market right now for CO2, for instance, to make plastics with CO2, which is chemically not that complicated. You know, it’s what we do. Its what nature does. So, the instruments needed that sort of bridge, this abstract graphs from the IPCC that say, well, we need to, you know, start taking carbon in the atmosphere and the sort of the long-term goals of all these governments that say the same. But we’re going to need thousands of people actually trying to come up with solutions for that and they have to do it inside companies. I would love for governments to create markets so entrepreneurs can go into these spaces and actually get funded and then 10 years from now are really big companies. That’s the challenge I see and by the way, whoever solves this problem first as a country is going to be in an energy and economy powerhouse of the 21st century. You’re going to be the new Saudi Arabia or the new Russia in terms of what that means for the world economy. The biggest oil producers will go out of business and the ones that figure out how to create these all these chemicals that we still going to need, but do it with CO2, do it efficiently, build the infrastructure for it, make it scalable, have the investment behind it, the project financing. If you can bring all that together in the next 10 years, you’re ready to completely go off the charts economically when the world catches up and we’re going to start pricing carbon.
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:34:47] Those are very interesting insights and certainly something that is food for thought. One final question. You are seen as an inspirational leader in this field. If there was one key takeaway for our listeners today, what would that be?
Working On Something Which Is Valuable For The World
Frans Nauta: [00:35:06] One of the best things in life, I think is to work on something that you’re passionate about, that is valuable for the world, for the people around you, for your kids and for you. And climate change is just that. I’m fifty-three now, and the last thing that I can imagine is retiring. To me, that is a horror scenario and I’m forced to play golf with Donald Trump. I find the idea of retiring boring. My goal is to never retire because I like this work so much. If I’m lucky, I have another 30 years in me and good health. Who knows? Maybe even more. See. But for the next 30 years, I can earn a living and work on something that I find truly meaningful. And then the other thing that has been one of the gifts of doing this work, I run into the nicest people all the time. All these entrepreneurs that work on climate change, they’re that they’re the most wonderful people that I have met. So not only gives me income, but it also gives me a sense of doing something useful. And I meet all these wonderful people all across all across the world. And I’d say this is open to everyone. I don’t know how old you are. You’re a bit younger than me. For the next 50 years of your life this could be your life’s work. One of the most interesting things when I started my studies, I felt like I was the underdog. And I’m getting more and more the feeling I was right all along. It’s only going to get better. So, come join the movement. We need good brains, good energy and willingness to solve this problem for humanity and for ourselves. And it’s going to be a wonderful journey.
Dr Renard Siew ideaXme climate change ambassador: [00:37:23] Thank you very much Frans for sharing your wonderful stories and inspiring insights with ideaXme show’s audience today.
Frans Nauta: [00:37:36] My pleasure. Thank you for having me Renard.
Credits: Dr Renard Siew, ideaXme Climate Change Ambassador.
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