The Truth is Powerful
The climate VC who gave up on politics
By RYAN HEATH
07/27/2022 12:00 PM EDT
Presented by VERBATIM
Danijel Višević entered venture capital after getting impatient with government’s pace in addressing climate change.
He reinvented himself as a tech investor after years working to shape German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s global TV image as part of her communications team.Višević is a founding partner of Europe’s biggest climate tech fund, World Fund, which has offices in Amsterdam, Berlin and Munich. It focuses on investing in companies that it thinks have the potential to reduce emissions by at least 100 million metric tons per year. POLITICO caught up with Višević at the Collision tech conference last month in Toronto. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What’s wrong with venture capital today? One is VCs often only look at the obvious financial numbers. If you invest in climate tech, and in solutions that solve real problems, you need physicists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, biologists that also have venture capital investment experience, who understand tech and can compare technologies to then come to a decision.A worldwide issue is this short-term thinking among VCs. We are starting to see funds set up […]