🔥 Fireside Chat: Accelerating Emerging Climate Fields w/ Spark Climate Solutions

​🌱 Interviewed by Candice Ammori, attend to learn more about the emerging fields in climate and how you can get involved there.

About the Speakers
Erika Reinhardt  (ODCT1) and David Mann are co-founders of Spark Climate Solutions, a new non-profit focused on field-building in emerging climate areas. Spark focuses on under-addressed areas of science and technology that have the potential for large-scale mitigation of climate harm, addressing near-term warming, and contributing to climate repair. Spark works to accelerate these fields through building shared strategic roadmaps, providing research funding, seeding new organizations, coordinating a variety of stakeholders, engaging with experts, and communicating with the public. In its first 6 months, Spark raised $11M+ and seeded new international research programs in fundamental, neglected climate science.

Erika's background is in engineering leadership at high-growth software companies, with an impact bent. Previously, she started and co-led U.S. Digital Response's work to provide local election offices across the country the products and technical expertise they needed to run a smooth election, led the Payments Experience engineering group at Stripe, served as the Director of Engineering at OpenAI, and was the Director of Product Engineering at Planet Labs after being an early engineer there. Erika studied computer science, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering at MIT.

David's background is as a climate-focused advisor, investor, and consultant. He was a senior fellow at RMI, and co-founder and advisor to The Climate Map. Previously, David led product teams at Dropbox, invested in climatetech at Khosla Ventures, and led climate-focused teams at McKinsey & Company. David studied Applied Physics at Stanford (PhD '06) and Physics at Harvey Mudd.

​About the Interviewer

​Candice Ammori advises climate tech startups and was most recently the Founding Director of On Deck Climate Tech where she built a startup ecosystem and invested in climate tech companies. In the last year, she brought together 750+ people from across the global climate tech ecosystem, from policy experts to investors and founders, and helped talented folks start dozens of impactful organizations. Before that, her career spanned finance, data science, VR, cloud computing, and running a local business. She has a grad degree in statistics (focused on the ethics of AI) from the University of Michigan.