Climate Fund Spotlight: Tale Venture Partners
Less turnover, better morale, higher employee engagement and productivity, and boosting the bottom-line – these are some of the benefits of having a rich and inclusive company culture.
We’ve all heard about the importance of company culture and its connection to financial outperformance. But all too often, not enough attention is given to strengthening this vital aspect of business. Case in point, the tech industry loses $16 billion each year to voluntary workplace turnover, while 62% of workers said they would have stayed if the company improved its culture.
These types of statistics are what motivated Michael Young and Ed Jean-Louis to start Tale Venture Partners, a seed-stage venture capital firm with a core focus of helping founders build strong culture strategically and intentionally from the early stages as a means to alpha generation.
Tale’s Why
When these general partners evaluated the venture industry, they noticed several aspects of the model that could be improved. “VCs traditionally infuse companies with a lot of cash and expect them to grow at all costs. We think this approach is fundamentally broken,” explains Michael. “When you grow a company ultra-fast you don’t always have control over what’s happening. You’re working on a product, have a vision for where you want the company to go, and you’re just trying to quickly fill butts in seats. So, you take short cuts and don’t have the right processes to evaluate employees on multiple levels. The consequences of scaling a company really fast often cause company culture to go awry. This results in what we’ve seen in the news time and time again where a CEO gets removed because of a toxic culture that they likely didn't intend to create but often get scapegoated for.”
Tale Venture Partners, on the other hand, view culture as a strategic imperative in any company’s growth strategy, so they get in the trenches with entrepreneurs to increase their chances of success. They take their portfolio companies through their culture-building program, called “Formula-C,” to help them “put cultural principals in place, so that when they hire and scale, things don’t fall off the rails,” continues Michael.
Deep Tech Investment Focus
Ed and Michael invest primarily in software – specifically enterprise, B2B, and marketplaces – as well as frontier technology startups.
They focus on finding:
Exceptional founders and teams with deep domain expertise
Innovation driven solutions disrupting legacy industries
Defensible competitive advantages
Organizations receptive to use culture as a risk mitigator and value multiplier
FrontierTech + ClimateTech
Since so much of ClimateTech is on the front lines of a changing global marketplace and consumer demand, Tale Venture Partners got into the sustainability space through their mission to uncover the most promising FrontierTech. A prime example of this is one of their portfolio companies, SparkCharge, a mobile electric vehicle (EV) charging company that they invested in a number of times.
“There are fewer than 5% EV’s on the road in the US right now. What happens when it’s 10 or 15%?” asks Ed. “What happens to charging infrastructure then? What happens to the grid then? What happens to customer experience then? We can see that we’re not even in the first inning. Someone is singing the national anthem right now. Initially with SparkCharge, we thought it was serving after-market service providers and roadside assistance. Then we started to see that there are consumer use cases for this, a utility use case, an enterprise level use case, and municipality use cases for this. There are now end users who are reaching out to get their hands on this product.”
Through Ed and Michael’s involvement with SparkCharge, more and more founders and entrepreneurs are approaching them to partner at the intersection of FrontierTech and ClimateTech. The GPs are increasingly focusing on startups that are reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), improving the quality of life for people (particularly in low-income communities), making CleanTech products affordable and accessible, and developing more sustainable options for products that people and businesses use.
VCI’s Climate Justice Initiative
Equity is part of Tale VP’s mission. “One of the reasons we started this fund was because there weren’t a lot of people that looked like us that were investing,” explains Ed. “By extension, there are not a lot of startup founders that look like us that are getting dollars. We think the work that VCI is doing is extremely important, not only on the fund investment side, but also supporting the whole ecosystem. We need to collectively solve a number of challenges at the same time. The more folks we have supporting the ecosystem, the more founders we can support, the more generational wealth we can create, and then hopefully that wealth pours back into the ecosystem and we’ll have a bigger table and more people doing the same thing.”
Ed ads that VCI’s Climate Justice Initiative for Diverse Emerging Fund Managers is setting an important example. “We need to see organizations doing things that are unconventional so that we are not afraid to do it, so we know that it’s possible, and we should build together.”
Michael interjects, “It means a lot to have working capital for folks like us who are starting out so we’re able to go out and operationalize an institutional fund. A fund that we hope will be here for generations.”
All of us at VCI hope to see Tale Venture Partners, and many other funds in our ecosystem, work together to grow, thrive, and improve company culture as well as national culture for many generations to come.
