Resources

Company resources:

• Microsoft’s climate and sustainability goals and initiatives
• How Microsoft is Leading the Response to the Climate Crisis (Forbes)
• Haveli Investments

Other resources:

• What’s the Difference Between Carbon Negative and Carbon Neutral? (World Economic Forum)
• Breakthrough Energy Catalyst platform for funding and investing in climate technology
• Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero coalition of financial institutions to invest in decarbonization

Previous Climate Rising episodes on carbon removal:

• U.S. DOE’s Jigar Shah & the State of Carbon Removal
• Tech-based Carbon Removal: Sustaera’s Direct Air Capture
• Nature-based Carbon Removal: DroneSeed’s Reforestation Model

Guests

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative

Lucas Joppa, Chief Sustainability Officer & Senior Managing Director, Haveli Investments

Mike Toffel:
This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I’m your host, Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS.

We’re continuing to dig into the world of corporate net zero climate targets. In this episode, I’m talking with Lucas Joppa, Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Managing Director at Haveli Investments and former Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft. I’ll ask Lucas how Microsoft set an unusual target of carbon negative, which goes beyond net zero and also about some of the interesting approaches they took, including establishing an internal carbon tax and setting up a billion dollar innovation fund.

Here’s my interview with Lucas Joppa of Haveli Investments, formerly of Microsoft.

Michael Toffel:
Well, Lucas, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Lucas Joppa:
Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Michael Toffel:
Well, let's start with an introduction. What's your current role?

Lucas Joppa:
I am the Chief Sustainability Officer and senior managing director at Haveli Investments. Haveli Investments is a software and gaming private equity investment firm.

Michael Toffel:
And before that, you were at Microsoft for a number of years, and that's really the area that we're going to talk most about today. What was the role that you had at Microsoft before you left and how long were you at Microsoft?

Lucas Joppa:
I was at Microsoft almost 13 years. I ended my career as the first chief environmental officer of the company and started my career as a computational ecologist in their blue sky research arm, Microsoft Research.

Michael Toffel:
What was that role?

Lucas Joppa:
That was looking and leading research programs at this intersection of environmental and computer science. I have always had this belief that the environment and the economy are inextricably intertwined. And when you look at the economy and society, technology plays such a massive role in that. And Microsoft's always been a very forward looking company. And so it's not like all of the company's resources were put into thinking about that topic, but it was, in my opinion, at least smart enough to put a few resources into thinking about that. And turned out to be quite a good thing to have thought about back in 2010 when I joined when you look at the arc, those kind of societal and regulatory pressure and expectation on large technology companies to think about sustainability

Michael Toffel:
Yeah. And then how did you navigate your way from that role all the way up to Chief environmental officer?

Lucas Joppa:
Well, I spent a lot of time doing what you might think of as kind of peer academic research. And I really had this desire to try to influence the company that I worked at as opposed to just working there and trying to influence the world through the research that I was doing. And I actually left Microsoft Research to go start a program called AI for Earth that was all about trying to deploy the over 35 years of research and innovation that Microsoft had done in the fields of machine learning and AI more generally and show that it could be applicable in these core areas of climate and biodiversity and water and agriculture, a lot of the core natural resource aspects of the economy.

AI first became kind of the template for Microsoft's broader AI for good efforts and then AI for good efforts across the technology sector. And the company learned a lot as well, I mean about the capabilities, but also the deficiencies in the current tech stack and being able to help create solutions in the sustainability space. So I left research to go create and lead that program. I was the first chief environmental scientist for the company when I left.

Michael Toffel:
Got it. it was really quite impressive to me how many interesting activities were going on at Microsoft during the time you were there, including the time you were leading its environmental efforts. And one of those is that it's declared to be carbon negative by 2030 as a target. And you hear all sorts of targets. You hear X percent decline of emissions by some date. You hear net zero targets, you hear science-based targets, but there aren't too many companies talking about carbon negative targets. And so I wonder if you can talk about that. But before we do about the carbon negative, just help us understand what is it, what are the major emission sources of a company like Microsoft? Because I can imagine there's data centers and there's offices and there's supply chain.

Lucas Joppa:
Yes.

Michael Toffel:
But where are the particularly heavy and intense, in what areas are the emissions largest?

Lucas Joppa:
Well, I would say that Microsoft is very similar to any large cloud technology company in its emissions sources. If we break down scope one emissions, scope two emissions and scope three emissions scope one being the emissions you're directly responsible for. So for a cloud company, you might think about backup diesel generators at data centers, for instance. When you turn those on, those are your scope one emissions. Your scope two emissions are the emissions associated with all the electricity that you use. And if you're a cloud company, that can be quite significant. And then your scope three emissions are quite literally everything else, all of your upstream supply chain and downstream value chain and use of product and things like that.

So like most companies, Microsoft had very small scope one emissions, pretty large, actual scope two emissions relative to a non-technology, non-com computing company. But it was really at scope three emissions that kind of drowned everything else out. And less than a hundred thousand scope one emissions and up in the 14 million tons of scope three emissions. So orders of magnitude difference there. And that's not that dissimilar to most companies. But I would say that unlike a lot of other sectors, scope two emissions for cloud companies are very, very significant

Michael Toffel:
Because they're so electricity intensive.

Lucas Joppa:
Exactly.

Michael Toffel:
Got it. Now that we understand the sources of your emissions, let's pivot and talk about this carbon negative target. Usually, if I can imagine you were thinking through various targets you could pursue, and this wouldn't have even been on the whiteboard thinking through the pros and cons. So where did it come from and how did that story evolve?

Lucas Joppa:
Microsoft had been working on sustainability way before me and I'm no longer there. And they're continuing to do great things in sustainability. a lot of people I think were taken aback by what they perceive to be how quickly Microsoft got to a commitment, as significant as its carbon negative commitment. But I think that that does a disservice to the well over a decade that the company had been working on this topic already.

But very specifically about carbon negative, this really went back to the 2018 slash 2019, the IPCC special report on global warming of above 1.5 degrees Celsius. We've been focusing on two degrees, but let's just be clear, two degrees is way worse than 1.5 degrees. It's not just half a degree worse, it's not how this stuff works. And so that was really kind of a wake up call I think for the non-scientific world and for the corporate world.

And I think if you go back and would talk to chief sustainability officers that were in role at that time, there'd be pretty broad consensus that that report was a significant inflection point in management teams kind of interest and motivation and ambition on climate. And it was no different for Microsoft. I think the question was, hey, we've been working in this space for a long time, are we doing enough?

Michael Toffel:
Yeah, I'm not sure anyone would say that today even that they're doing enough.

Lucas Joppa:
No, no, I don't think they should. And so the question is like, okay, well if the answer's obviously no, we're not doing enough, then the next obvious question is What more should we do? And that's where carbon negative came from. And it came from a recognition that the conversation had changed globally around climate, and there'd really been this consensus on this term and outcome of net zero that as a global society and economy, we have to transition to a world where all of the emissions that humans put into the atmosphere, humans also have to take out.

the world needs to get to net zero, what's Microsoft going to do about it? And Microsoft is not just a normal company, it has abnormal resources, it has abnormal influence, and quite frankly, it has abnormal expectations on it because of those things to do things that are above and beyond.

And so there was this recognition that not everybody, not every industry, not every sector, not every company's going to be able to get to net zero. So some companies are going to have to go beyond. Well, what is beyond net zero?

But we were sitting in a conference room And somebody mentioned this term carbon negative, and well, the only thing beyond zero is negative.

Lucas Joppa:
And we were really kind of taken by that because it really kind of fit the ethos and the values that we were asked to go and come up with this plan around. And then the next obvious question was, okay, well how much more is negative? where we ultimately landed as a company was to instead of trying to figure out whole bunch of different complicated formulas or equations or proportional shares of responsibility, whatever, we just said, well, let's keep it about ourselves. And let's say that negative is not just zeroing out our emissions every year moving forward, but going in, taking out all of the emissions that we are associated with since we were founded in 1975.

We said, we're going to reduce our emissions by half or more by 2030 and then continue to zero out our emissions on annual basis every year moving forward. And that we were going to from 2030 to 2050, remove all of those additional emissions from our historical business practices. And once we got there, everything else went pretty quickly thereafter.

Michael Toffel:
So reducing emissions by half by 2030 and zeroing out the rest, presumably through offsets and other instruments like that, I suppose you mean.

Lucas Joppa:
Basics.

Michael Toffel:
And then from 2030 to 2050, using that time period to go beyond just zeroing out, to remove the historical emissions, which will be through carbon removal technologies like direct air source capture and things like that.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah. That was one of the other big shifts that Microsoft made when it made its carbon negative announcement. it was the first big corporate to make a carbon negative commitment. But the other, and potentially even more meaningful shift, I think that Microsoft made in its strategy was it said it was going to do that through the use of carbon removal approaches as opposed to avoided emissions approaches. And Microsoft had been a significant player in the avoid the emissions marketplace. And avoid the emissions is doing things like paying people not to cut down trees, paying people to fix leaks in their oil pipelines with methane fugitive gas and release, all those sorts of things. Paying people to move from a relatively dirty activity to a relatively cleaner activity.

And Microsoft had been a very significant player in that market since 2012. And we decided that not only was carbon negative going beyond net zero, something that Microsoft could help change the game on, but also how it did that. It could also push the boundaries on the technologies and approaches of how we reached net zero because we looked at the best available science, and there was basically no credible socioeconomic model that didn't show the world overshooting its carbon budget. What became clear is we weren't all going to be able to pay each other enough to reduce emissions to zero. So there was going to have to be carbon removal. And when Microsoft came out and started talking about carbon removal, it seems crazy now because that was in 2020, and it's only 2023 now, but when Microsoft came out and started talking about carbon removal, that was a really controversial topic.

There was a lot of moral hazard arguments about that and everything else. But we were very convinced that somebody, that the world was going to get to 2050 and it was going to have to remove all this carbon. And it was going to be a real shame if we had to then start in 2050 figuring out how to mature carbon removal technologies.

Michael Toffel:
Yeah.

Lucas Joppa:
Right. So weren't out there saying everything everybody else is doing is bad. We were just saying this is going to have to be a tool in the toolbox. And it's incredibly immature, both from a technology perspective and from a marketplace perspective.

So it's all carbon removal with a fairly agnostic, but I'll break them down to nature-based solutions and engineered solutions. Afforestation reforestation, soil carbon sequestration using evolution and biology to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale. And engineered solutions all the way up to things like direct air capture, machines that are literally sucking air in and removing the CO2 and then ultimately permanently sequestering it in geological rock formation. Microsoft has mobilized incredible amounts of financial resources in order to help move that stuff along

Michael Toffel:
We've done some episodes on carbon removal, both on the engineered solutions and the nature-based solutions. And two big concerns, one with nature-based solutions is permanence, like are sure it's going to result in that carbon being sequestered in soils or in vegetation? And on the engineering side, it was cost. It's like, whoosh, we're in a rush. We're in a race. We're at 500 to a thousand dollars a ton, and we're trying to get to 150 or something. Even if we get to 150, boy, that's a lot of tons to multiply that number by that you mentioned earlier.

Lucas Joppa:
Sure is.

Michael Toffel:
Did Microsoft take an account and say, gulp, we realize how much money this could, and now nobody really knows the learning curves. Maybe they'll get that 150 down to 70 and maybe even less.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah.

Michael Toffel:
But at some point the making a commitment with such a long range time horizon with such uncertain technologies sounds like a billion dollar bet.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think one thing is don't underestimate the amount of resources that are being put into this by a company like Microsoft. So there's a lot on the line, but there's also a first mover advantage from a contracting perspective, et cetera. I think one of the things that really drove the decision making over the finish line was a deep belief, at least at the time I was there, that this was inevitable. The requirements that what Microsoft was committing to was simply what everyone was going to have to do. So if you have the resources to get a headstart, why wouldn't you? If you have the resources to pre-negotiate those multi-year contracts at a time when buyers are scarce, as opposed to in 2029 when the market is wildly oversubscribed and prices are skyrocketing, why wouldn't you? And that is the prerogative of large successful organizations and individuals to be able to have that forward thinking.

But I would argue that Microsoft had been doing that from the time I and my colleagues in the computational ecology group were hired in 2010. Most companies didn't have the resources to be able to be thinking about things that far out. So I would just say that like a lot of things in climate these days, there's a lot of people saying, wow, That's expensive. I just know from a science perspective what you will have to do. And that was what was so cool about Microsoft is it was very aware of the physical realities on society. And so it had this clear eyed view of looking forward and saying, well, if this is inevitable, then there are significant societal benefits to Microsoft using its resources in growing and maturing these markets and technologies. And there's significant organizational benefits to doing that as well and being a first mover. And I think that those two things combined are what got everything on the finish line.

Michael Toffel:
Got it. Super interesting. Well, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the how. So Microsoft has done some very interesting things in the course of pursuing these goals. And one of them is governance. So there's a lot of different ways firms organize their sustainability or environmental leadership team. Often having nowadays as chief sustainability officer who might report directly to the CEO in some companies or through legal or the chief operating officer or manufacturing or marketing, whole variety we see out there in industry. And Microsoft took a somewhat different approach by engaging a team of senior leaders, cross-functional teams as I understand it. Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of that and what it looked like?

Lucas Joppa:
I think organizational structure is the most significant challenge that any chief sustainability officer can face, which sounds very boring because you have real problems like how to remove carbon from the atmosphere at very low prices or how do you decarbonize your supply chain or whatever. But none of that's going to happen unless you get the organizational structure right. And so what I think Microsoft did very well was they said, okay, this isn't a horizontal problem. Sustainability isn't just everybody's job, it's somebody's job, it's the chief environmental officer's job, but it's also not just a pure vertical. It's not just that person and their team's job. It's actually a 45 degree angle through the whole organization. And the question is, well, how do you manage at a 45 degree angle across a business? And I think what Microsoft did was kind of the best I've seen, although that's obviously a very biased statement.

And what we did was we set up a team that basically tried to mirror the company. So the core sustainability team had a customer engagement component, it had a product engineering component, it had finance component and marketing and communications component. It had a science team, it had an operations team. So kind of all the things we were trying to recreate all of Microsoft's functions, but we were trying to at least emulate it so that we were able to connect efficiently and, well, you connect efficiently with all of our peers across the company.

And then we kind of expanded that in one greater kind of concentric circle and established what was called the Climate Council, which had membership from every business division inside the company, senior membership, like corporate vice president level membership, decision maker membership, and chaired by the president and the chief financial officer jointly chaired by the president, chief financial officer of the company.

And so with that structure, we were able to have a team that was able to work across all of these areas and then bring the company together on top of that in a way that made sure that everybody felt responsibility, but there was a responsible team, there was a responsible council, and there was a responsible corporation. And trying to build those kind of concentric circles out to the final outcome that you release in your annual end of year emissions numbers. That's not a job that's ever done if it were, companies wouldn't be reorging all the time. But it's a struggle that every CSO has, and it's one that I think Microsoft did quite well.

Michael Toffel:
Why do you think Microsoft is unusual in this regard? Why don't other companies replicate this strategy?

Lucas Joppa:
I think Microsoft is an unusual company. ]it's a really nerdy engineering company. It wants to write that piece of code, it wants to build that organizational structure. It's kind of not that interested in the conversation about it. It just wants to do it. And it's what I loved about being there.

But I think that because that's kind of its primary motivator, it wasn't like Microsoft did all of that work because they really wanted to win the marketing mindshare around sustainability, or it wasn't because they wanted to win the product marketplace. They wanted to do all of those things, sure, but they just wanted to show that it could be done. And to arrive at the societally established finish line of 2030 and 2050 with the report written, ready to turn in their homework, not spend the night cramming.

Michael Toffel:
Right. So it sounds like kind of an engineering mindset, maybe a little less ego driven. Are those the enablers that allowed it to create the structure that might be preventing others from doing so?

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of egos inside of Microsoft. I'm sure you've read plenty of case studies about it. But it is an engineering company at its core. It's what I think made the whole thing possible because for instance, a lot of my peers across different industries asked me, oh, how did you deal with the climate deniers in the company? And I'm like, well, I didn't ever have to do that because we were able to dissolve this down into mathematical equations on a whiteboard. And if you're in an engineering company, no one's going to deny the math if they value their career.

Michael Toffel:
Yeah.

Michael Toffel:
All right. So let's talk about a few of the other approaches. An internal carbon tax is much talked about for many, many years, but not many companies have actually introduced it. So can you talk about what is internal carbon tax in the context of Microsoft's journey and how did it arise as a tool that you actually decided to adopt for a while?

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah, sure. But what a lot of people don't know is that Microsoft has an internal carbon tax, a real price on carbon that's actually charged to all business groups for all carbon emitting activities. It was established a decade before Microsoft had made its carbon negative commitment. And so it's an instrument that has been in place inside the company, has been kind of institutionalized. People understand it. And then it was really brought to the fore as a tool to enable the execution of the carbon negative commitment. So Microsoft established carbon tax back in 2013, has played around with the price over time, has played around with how the revenue is used, et cetera, et cetera. But it's at least while I was there, really intended to do two things. To send a price signal to business groups to reduce carbon emissions and to accumulate revenue to pay for things like carbon removal.

And it's kind of as simple as that. We've got to figure out the price, and that is based on the cost of carbon removal and the price of reducing carbon in different business activities. But whether or not other companies do, I wouldn't say it's a tool that is immediately applicable to all sorts of companies. If it works for your corporate philosophy and governance structure, it can be a really great tool. But also companies aren't democracies. You can just tell a business group what to do instead of tax them if you so wish.

Michael Toffel:
So what price range had the tax been in the time you were there?

Lucas Joppa:
It had varied all over the place. They weren't public about it.

Michael Toffel:
Oh, okay.

Lucas Joppa:
the point is how do I charge you as little as possible and still get the result? That's what a business is trying to do. And so that's one thing that I would just kind of word of caution as people are thinking about instituting prices is you'll get pressure to kind of signal through the price, your ambition or your sincerity. It's like, no, the outcome is the signal of your sincerity. The price is just a mechanism for how you might achieve that.

Michael Toffel:
Yeah. That makes sense. And so turning the dial on price is both, you said, a function of funding, how much it would cost to fund reductions through, for example, efficiency measures and through this carbon removal ambition of investing in carbon removal over time. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. That's linking the need with the cost very directly.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah. And the difficulty is, you're trying to have an efficient, clear, transparent price to the company, but the price of reduction or the cost of reduction varies drastically depending on the source of emissions. So think about energy related emissions going into your data centers and how much renewable energy costs versus how much sustainable aviation fuel costs for your business air travel. Those prices are wildly different, hundreds of dollars different.

Michael Toffel:
Yeah.

Lucas Joppa:
So if you want to have a single blended fee, you've got to find a way to make that fee fair to, let's say, the energy team who's probably overpaying for the fee and the procurement team who's probably underpaying for air travel. So I think one of the things that a lot of people who do have fees are increasingly looking towards is how you tie, how you disaggregate your fee, unblend your fee, and so that there's a more emissions source specific fee for all of your different scope one, two, and 15 categories of scope three.

Michael Toffel:
Right. So to have a stratified set of fees as opposed to a set fee.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah.

Michael Toffel:
All right. So we talked about this internal carbon tax and you mentioned it's going to accumulate funds. Is that the innovation fund or is that a different fund?

Lucas Joppa:
That's a different fund. So that's another thing that Microsoft announced as part of its carbon negative commitment. A billion dollar climate innovation fund that was intended to allow Microsoft to invest in the new technologies and the new companies that were going to be needed to deliver all the carbon reduction removal solutions that it was going to have to buy. And the way that we looked at this was basically a very simplistic like, hey, if you want to mature a market, there's kind of three levers or three roles you can play. You can be like a donor, a philanthropist, you can be a customer and you can be an investor.

And we decided to play all three roles. And so we had this fee that allowed Microsoft to become the largest purchaser of carbon removal in history. Then we established this fund that for a short amount of time, created Microsoft as the largest investor in de-carbonization. This is one of those areas where competition is such a win-win. a few weeks after Microsoft announced a billion dollar fund, Amazon announced a 2 billion dollar fund. And I think that was just amazing because now there's 3 billion dollars for climate that never existed. And then another thing that Microsoft did was a hundred million dollar donation to this Catalyst program out of the Breakthrough Energy Organization. And so that was a donation of a hundred million dollars. And so it became one of the largest philanthropists in this space as well.

And then I guess if you want to really stretch it, there's one fourth role that you can play, and that's as a supplier. And that's what Microsoft decided to do with its cloud for sustainability and putting in the hands of customers around the world, new digital tools for robust carbon accounting and reporting. And so it was kind of a 360 approach to trying to mature all of this. It's like, hey, we're going to be a supplier. We're going to be a customer, we're going to be an investor, and we're going to be a donor and we're going to try to be one of the biggest in the world in all of those things.

Michael Toffel:
So a billion dollars seems like a big number. Is that a big number for Microsoft?

Lucas Joppa:
Well, it's definitely a small number for what the world needs to invest in climate. But yeah, I mean it's not like Microsoft announces billion dollar funds every day. So yeah, it was definitely significant. I think the world stood up and took notice. And it really did, I think, provide cover for a lot of other funds to then stand up.

Lucas Joppa:
And by the time I left two years later, we were competing to get into deals.

Michael Toffel:
That's the competition that you want in a sense.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah, exactly.

Michael Toffel:
Did shareholders push back on these types of efforts in a meaningful way?

Lucas Joppa:
I mean, shareholders do all sorts of crazy things, right? I think I would say that I spent a lot of time talking to shareholders that were just interested in how we were doing it because they were big institutional investors and they wanted to understand. This was before whatever anti-ESG backlash was happening in the investor landscape as well. So it wasn't normal to be actively trying to stop people from saving the planet.

Michael Toffel:
Right. Well, it was even before the net zero portfolio movement as well.

Lucas Joppa:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean this was before GFANZ for The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. Before Glasgow Cop 26. It was before the big finance push. And that's actually ultimately why I decided to leave because in some part, because of what Microsoft had kicked off, the finance sector started to move. And I thought that that was where the big kind of next wave was.

Michael Toffel:
So I want to talk about your next role in a minute. The last effort that I wanted to cover was the climate research initiative at Microsoft. And I wonder if you can just say a few words about that.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah, I would just say that that was kind of a full circle sort of a thing. I started out in pure blue sky research. I happen to believe that if you're have the resources and are fortunate enough to have blue sky research in your company, you're just at an immediate advantage in pursuing innovation. And so having Microsoft Research itself, which has some of the world's top scholars across a whole host of different disciplines, themselves thinking about it, but also put in place a program that incentivizes collaboration and partnerships with academic institutions around the world, all working towards these big problems. Fantastic.

Because when you think about that innovation cycle, it's like Microsoft was out here trying to literally buy things in the market today, and then they said, okay, well, certain things we're going to need to buy that the science is pretty much sorted out, but the market hasn't sorted out, so we're going to invest in them so that we can get that up to the market maturity where we can purchase from. But there's other big solutions, 2050 style solutions that the science hasn't figured out. So let's get the pure research side going so that there's this whole innovation funnel that ultimately feeds to a corporate procurement program in 2050.

Michael Toffel:
So you mentioned the sparking of the investment movement is one of the reasons why you left, and you are at an investment house now. So tell us a little bit about that transition to Haveli Investments where you are now.

Lucas Joppa:
Yeah, so I happen to think that tech is leaving its most consequential decade. I think the establishment of the cloud was the biggest thing that tech has done and will do in a long time. And I include all of the AI stuff that's coming in that statement. And I believe that finance is just entering its most consequential decade because there's going to be this massive reorganization of our financial kind of systems and how capital is deployed as our socioeconomic kind of systems transition to a net zero world.

And I wanted to really be a part of that. I was lucky and fortunate enough to be a part of tech's most consequential decade. I wanted to be part of the finance movement, and I really wanted to prove that what we were doing at Microsoft wasn't a fluke. That we weren't doing something abnormal, even though Microsoft was an abnormal company. That an abnormal company was doing a normal thing, which is transitioning to net zero or carbon negative.

And to prove that, I wanted to show that lots of different companies could do it of different shapes and sizes, and that's what my ambition is at Haveli. As we grow a portfolio of mid and upper mid market software and enterprise software companies driving those companies to net zero, I want to show my ambition is to be net zero from fund one. And I want to show that yes, you can do it at one of the world's biggest companies. And yes, you can do it at any company, at least in the sector that I know and love, which is software.

And I'm super bullish about it. I mean, I wouldn't change careers if I wasn't bullish about Microsoft's ability to do its thing without me, and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now if I wasn't bullish about every company's ability to do this. And I'm bullish because it's inevitable because we have to do it. But I'm also bullish because it's such a massive value creation engine for the world to go and build again is something that offers opportunity for so many people, for so many organizations. It's just super exciting. I mean, it combines all that I think they teach you at business school plus so much more packed into the next three decades of our lives.

Michael Toffel:
Yeah. Well, the excitement is palpable in your remarks. And maybe this foreshadowed the last question that I ask our guests, which is for those interested in a career in the intersection of business and climate change, where are the biggest opportunities and what advice do you give folks?

Lucas Joppa:
climate isn't a vertical and it's not a horizontal, it's a 45 degree angle. I mean that about through a business, I mean that through the economy, and I mean that through your career as well. So I have so many people that come up and say, I want to get a job in the sustainability team at Company X that I work at. And I'm like, why? There's a million ways to be more powerful in sustainability in your company. Because it's an engineer coming and telling me that. I'm like, well, figure out how to lead the green software engineering revolution inside your company. Be that rockstar engineer that decarbonizes your IT stack.

Or be that green finance hero and innovator in your company and define and build that new carbon tax that meets all of those financial efficiency goals. Or be that procurement legend that signed that 12 year multi year off take agreement, da, da, da, da. Those are the things. Why did you go to business school? Because you like finance, because you like investing, because you like management, because you like whatever. I don't know what that thing is, but combine that with climate and figure out a way to almost dual degree your career. And that's what I think the world needs. And ultimately, I think it's what will lead to long-term kind of career happiness and career growth.

Michael Toffel:
Great. Lucas, it's been a really interesting conversation. I've really enjoyed hearing your journey at Microsoft and beyond and hearing really interesting stories that I've never heard before about Microsoft's approach. So I really appreciate you spending time with us here on Climate Rising.

Lucas Joppa:
Thanks for having me.

Mike Toffel:
That was my conversation with Lucas Joppa, Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Managing Director at Haveli Investments and former Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft.