I’m often asked why I left SOSV to build Renovate. It’s the one year anniversary of that decision, and in honor of that milestone, I decided to reflect on why I left and where we’re headed.

I saw hard tech startups go through steep inflection points during my time at SOSV. The ones that I was always the most drawn towards were making an outsized impact on climate (R-Zero, Neptune Robotics, Unpsun, Livin Farms, Opentrons, etc).

I quickly realized that for me, robotics* is all about climate.

Solving for climate means re-inventing our world from the ground up, and robotics is playing a role in two key ways: robots are 100x-ing the pace of invention in the lab, and the deployment of those inventions into the real world.

It took hundreds of years for the world to industrialize. But we’re going to have to re-industrialize in a way that is climate conscious, in a tenth of the time it took the first time around. That’s going to take a huge amount of capital and resources, and robotics and automation are how we’ll get there.

So why Renovate specifically? The first thing I realized after digging deeper into roofing, is that it's one of the most climate driven industries in the world.

Roofs are the first line of defense for our homes and businesses, and as the climate continues to change, weather is causing increasingly severe roof damage. Roofs are also the future of residential solar, and accelerating rooftop solar is the best way to build a sustainable and distributed energy grid.

Just as important is the impact on humans. Roofing is one of the most dangerous trades. No one can live without a roof over their head, and no one should ever be put at risk for doing this meaningful work.

If Renovate succeeds: rooftop solar will be deployed faster than ever before, hard working Americans will no longer die while installing roofs, and homes and businesses across the country will be protected from severe weather.

If you’re also passionate about climate, I encourage you to think about how we can better utilize robots to accelerate the green transition - or come help us build Renovate.

*I use robotics in this context to capture all forms of physical automation. Robots aren’t just robot arms (as Abe Murray of AlleyCorp Robotics recently pointed out), and they’re already more commonplace than most people realize.