Bill Gates: How Entrepreneurs Can Benefit From Climate Change

The business veteran identified several market opportunities within the Clean Industrial Revolution.

Bill Gates. Photos: Getty Images

Bill Gates is challenging ambitious entrepreneurs to seize the opportunities presented by the fight against climate change. “People often think that fighting climate change is something that happens behind the scenes—via an algorithm optimizing energy use or a buried carbon capture system,“ Gates said in a Threads post last week. “But over the next year, some of the most powerful solutions will be working in plain sight.”

Gates expects solutions to climate change to become part of daily life—in “our homes, workplaces, and supermarkets,” he noted—due to the way they “save time, cut costs, and perform better” while helping fight climate change. Gates gave the example of Luxwall—a company in which he’s invested, per Crain’s Detroit Business—that creates vacuum-insulated windows. These types of windows reduce energy consumption by “acting like a thermos bottle.”

Gates is many things, including a generationally great entrepreneur and business executive. So when he gives away money-making ideas, I ask myself—what would it take for an ambitious entrepreneur to take advantage of these opportunities?

Are Gates’s Business Ideas Viable?

Gates went on to suggest three other possible opportunities beyond Luxwall:

Injecting captured CO2 into concrete.

Building EV-batteries with increased range and decreased costs.
Offering sustainable dairy protein alternatives—such as a fungi-based yogurt, which Gates prefers.

When considering a startup opportunity, I use a four-question test to evaluate the potential validity and scalability of the idea. It’s the same test I instruct my Babson College students to use in my class Scaling Strategy: Mastering the Four Stages From Idea to $10 Billion (based my book Scaling Your Startup).

If the answer to all four questions is yes, then I would give the founder a green light to pursue the opportunity. Let’s look at how this applies to a carbon capture company:

Does the product relieve important consumer pain? The market for carbontech—which includes injecting CO2 into concrete—is expected to grow from $4 billion to $15 billion by 2032. This massive market suggests the technology relieves customer pain sufficiently well to make buyers willing to pay for it.
Will customers pay a high enough price for the startup to profit from selling the product? Given the size of the market, probably. But to drill down on this question, identify which industries purchase services for injecting CO2 into concrete, and who within these companies makes purchasing decisions.
Is the industry free of a well-established company that makes a product that already solves the problem? With only eight companies already injecting CO2 into concrete, according to Carbon Curve, there’s likely still plenty of room to compete in such a massive market. Start by identifying any significant unmet needs. What criteria, such as technical effectiveness, price, quality of references, do purchasers use to choose among competing suppliers? Which potential vendors do they consider and how well do they perform on these criteria?
Does the entrepreneur have the passion and the skills needed to build a product that relieves the customer pain better than rival products do? Only you can answer this question.