SolarCycle is building the next supply chain that makes the clean energy transition possible. Co-founder Jesse Simons spent two decades at the Sierra Club leading national campaigns to accelerate renewable energy before seeing the constraint built into solar’s own success. There aren’t enough raw materials to keep scaling, and communities are starting to resist projects without end-of-life plans.

With a deep bench of industry founders, operators, and visionaries, SolarCycle is closing that loop. They’ve developed technology to extract glass, aluminum, copper, silicon, and silver from old panels—and the reverse logistics to move them efficiently from field to factory.

This episode explores how SolarCycle is making recycling cost-competitive with landfilling—and why that threshold could define the future of solar. As circularity becomes essential to project approvals, investor confidence, and long-term supply, renewable energy is entering its next phase—where even the panels must become renewable too.

Show Notes

Guest: Jesse Simons, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer (corrected)

Company: SOLARCYCLE

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Ken LaRoe has done what no one else in U.S. history has: founded three banks. His first two were financial successes. His third—Climate First Bank—is his answer to unfinished business. Built to align money with mission, it’s now America’s fastest-growing new bank, surpassing $1.4 billion in assets while financing the clean energy economy.

In this episode, Ken shares what he learned across 25 years of banking—why financial performance and climate action can’t be opposites, and how being, in his words, a “rabid environmentalist and rabid capitalist” became his edge. He explains how Climate First’s fintech arm, OneEthos, built proprietary software that powers $30 million in solar loans each month across 700+ installers—without relying on tax credits or Wall Street intermediaries.

Now, as the bank prepares for an IPO, Ken is proving that mission-driven finance can outperform the market—and that the clean energy transition runs on something deeper than capital: conviction.

Show Notes

Guest: Ken LaRoe, CEO of Climate First Bancorp and Executive Chairman of Climate First Bank

Comnpany: Climate First Bank

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Cambium is building the operating system for reuse—a digital supply chain connecting the fragmented network of companies needed to turn fallen trees into finished goods.

Every year, tens of millions of urban trees come down. The scale is staggering, and most end up chipped, burned, or buried. Cambium links tree-removal crews, haulers, mills, and end customers through a unified digital platform—transforming what was once waste into market-ready material.

Today, more than 500 companies across the U.S. and Canada coordinate each tree’s journey, forming a just-in-time network for reclaimed wood.

Co-founder and CEO Ben Christensen calls it building a “tech-native forestry company”—one where reuse runs on code, data, and tight coordination. In this episode, Ben and host Josh Dorfman explore how mastering complexity becomes a competitive advantage, how data builds defensibility, and how scaling reuse could redefine how the material economy works.

Show Notes

Guest: Ben Christensen

Company: Cambium

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AI, electrification, decarbonization—they all hinge on how effectively the grid is orchestrated. Yet thousands of clean energy projects are stuck in U.S. interconnection queues. The backlog is twice the size of all the energy we use today. It’s not a cost problem. It’s the grid—the largest machine on earth—built last century for stability and missing the cloud-scale infrastructure to handle what’s ahead.

Astrid Atkinson has run a machine like this before. At Google, she spent fifteen years in site reliability engineering, keeping Search, Maps, YouTube, and Gmail online with 99.999% uptime. If google.com went down, her team got paged. Running one of the world’s largest critical infrastructure systems taught her a lesson: you don’t scale by adding infinite hardware. You scale with visibility, software, and flexibility.

Now, as co-founder and CEO of Camus Energy, she’s applying that lesson to the grid. Camus builds a real-time data layer—linking past, present, and future—and turns it into signals utilities use to coordinate assets: charge later, ramp down, discharge when needed.

With visibility and signals, utilities gain the control knobs they need—so projects connect in months instead of years and demand flexibility becomes part of the grid’s DNA.

Show Notes

Guest: Astrid Atkinson, co-founder and CEO

Company: Camus Energy

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Curbside charging sounds obvious—plug in outside your apartment, wake up to a full battery. Yet more than 40 million potential urban EV owners are still waiting for someone to figure it out.

it’s electric, co-founded by Tiya Gordon, is designing EV charging for cities—making curbside charging possible by inventing what didn’t exist: hardware powered directly by buildings, a revenue model that pays property owners, and a way to work with cities that clears the path to install. Its chargers are already operational in Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco, with more cities on the way.

Tiya brings a unique background in public-facing technology and design to the challenge—she led the technology for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Now she’s assembled a team from transportation, design, and public projects—people who know how to connect landlords, planners, and engineers into the same conversation. That’s how It’s Electric moves swiftly through city permitting in days instead of years—and why the future of EV charging will feel less like bulky infrastructure, and more like disco and sunshine.

Show Notes

Guest: Tiya Gordon

Company: it's electric

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By fusing architect and developer, Alloy Development is proving that the riskiest choice in real estate isn’t electrification or Passive House — it’s clinging to the past.

CEO Jared Della Valle joins Supercool to share the company’s journey to developing The Alloy Block in downtown Brooklyn—aiming to create the most sustainable block in the city. It’s anchored by 505 State Street, New York’s first all-electric skyscraper; two Passive House–certified public schools; and soon, One Third Avenue—the tallest Passive House tower in the world.

Della Valle describes how Alloy built investor confidence project by project—staying nimble, controlling risk, and executing at a standard that pulled institutional capital toward climate performance. He explains why going all-electric lowered long-term risk, how policy and pricing dynamics shifted investor expectations, and why the most competitive real estate today is also the cleanest.

Alloy is shifting how Wall Street perceives risk and return—redefining climate performance not as the exception, but the expectation.

Show Notes

Guest: Jared Della Valle, CEO

Company: Alloy Development

Project: The Alloy Block

Building: 505 State Street - All-Electric Skyscraper

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Mike Faherty grew up surfing the Jersey Shore, surrounded by coastal style but chasing something that felt more enduring. Even as a kid, he obsessed over fabrics—the way silk ties carried weight, how colors layered, how clothes gained character through texture. By seventeen, he had already mapped the outlines of the brand he wanted to build.

In 2012, he launched Faherty with his twin brother Alex and sister-in-law Kerry—creating a clothing company rooted in surf culture, elevated by craft, and grounded in responsibility. Today, it's grown into one of the most distinctive brands in American fashion—80+ stores, hundreds of millions in revenue, and a headquarters team of just over 100 people that still moves with the urgency of a “Day One” startup.

Faherty doesn’t market itself as a sustainability brand, but responsibility is stitched into its DNA. Seventy-two percent of fabrics already meet the company’s responsible sourcing standard, with a goal of 100% by 2030—all disclosed in its public Impact Report. Regenerative organic cotton from the Amazon. Recycled polyester engineered for softness. Supply chain partners chosen for shared values and trust.

In this conversation, Mike, the company's Chief Creative Officer, shares how a lifelong passion for materials became a strategy for innovation—why feel matters, how responsibility shows up behind the seams, and what it takes to scale a modern American fashion brand built for lasting impact.

Show Notes

Guest: Mike Faherty, Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer

Company: Faherty Brand

Resource: Faherty Brand Impact Report

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Forum Mobility is electrifying how America moves freight. Every year, more than 30,000 diesel 18-wheelers haul containers in and out of California’s ports, logging over a billion miles, generating enormous carbon emissions and polluting nearby communities.

Electric semis are powerful, quiet, and clean. But at $500,000 apiece with uncertain charging and maintenance, the math doesn’t work for the independent operators — often family-run businesses — who move most containers from port to warehouse, the first mile of logistics known as drayage. The technology is ready. The adoption is stuck.

In 2024, Forum Mobility opened the world’s largest port-based charging depot at Long Beach. But the company’s breakthrough isn’t hardware — it’s the model: EV Trucking as a Service. By bundling trucks and charging into a predictable monthly subscription, Forum Mobility makes running electric cheaper than diesel and removes the risk that has stalled adoption.

Founder and CEO Matt Leducq saw the same shift in solar, where he built his career and where financing innovation became the key to unlocking market adoption. Now he’s betting the same playbook can electrify freight.

Show Notes

Guest: Matt Leducq, Co-Founder & CEO

Company: Forum Mobility

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