We already have the technology to decarbonize buildings, and many pilot projects have shown it works. So why hasn’t progress toward net zero moved faster? Colin Mangham believes it’s because we’re still using outdated business models to promote new solutions. Colin is the Chief Experience Officer at the US Green Building Council California and leads its Net Zero Accelerator, the first program focused only on net-zero innovation for buildings. Since 2019, the accelerator has helped over 100 companies in a six-month program that stands out by putting real technology pilots into actual buildings with dedicated partners, then tracking the results. This approach has led to more than 60 pilot projects in California and beyond, providing the proven results that founders and investors need to move forward. Colin offers a unique mix of experience to this field. He has served as Chief Marketing Officer at four growing companies, co-founded and led Morpho Energy, which helps put unused commercial rooftops to work for solar, and he is a certified biomimicry specialist, which shapes what he teaches founders. He often thinks about beavers, which are keystone species that create habitats for others by building their own homes. As he tells entrepreneurs, “This thing that you’re creating, it should also create better living environments for the people and the neighboring organisms all around you.” It’s an approach that applies systems thinking to business strategy, leading to companies that differ from the typical Silicon Valley disruptors.
The conversation includes case studies that illustrate the Net Zero Accelerator’s pilot-driven approach to incubating companies. ByFusion makes construction-grade blocks from unrecyclable plastic with 83% lower emissions than concrete alternatives. Their Boise pilot succeeded not because of a breakthrough in materials science, but because they orchestrated a community of stakeholders, overdelivered on their pilot, and built a predictable, repeatable outcome. And ePAVE, which makes a patented reflective pavement coating, turned a failed first application for Hudson Pacific Properties into a deeper partnership by reframing the product as “not faulty, but precision” technology that requires careful application to deliver on its engineered performance. Colin points out that there is ample shared ground to overcome political differences about sustainability: “The economics of the solution, the ROI, the lack of disruption, the speed to market, the replicability, the job creation—all these different things are the things that red and blue can agree on.” The companies that will succeed in creating net-zero buildings are making deals that tie financial rewards to performance, and building business models that make sustainability a reliable investment rather than a gamble.
To learn more about the Net Zero Accelerator, visit NetZeroAccelerator.org. Learn about the US Green Building Council of California at USGBC-CA.org.
Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:10
Hello! Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s talk the built environment. The technology exists to reduce the environmental impact of our homes and office buildings, skyscrapers and bridges, and bring them all much nearer to net zero. We have the materials that work and will benefit from discovering more. Pilot efforts have proven successful. So why hasn’t the march to net zero begun to scale faster?
And one answer is that we’re still trying to sell 21st-century performance with 20th-century business models. However, new approaches to revenue and customer agreements are emerging, from outcome-based contracts to resilience as a service. The companies that will win aren’t just building better—they’re structuring deals that align financial incentives with performance guarantees.
My guest today is Colin Mangham. He is Chief Experience Officer at the US Green Building Council California and its Net Zero Accelerator, which is an accelerator focused on the built environment. Since 2019, the Net Zero Accelerator has run more than 100 companies through a six-month program that does something most of these programs don’t: it places real technology pilots in real buildings with committed partners, and then measures what actually happens.
Colin brings a rare combination of perspectives to this work. He’s been a four-time Chief Marketing Officer for growth-stage companies, has guided dozens of global brands generating over $500 million in revenue, and has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs secure more than $80 million in capital. He’s also the co-founder and president of Morpho Energy, a company working to unlock the idle asset value of commercial and industrial rooftops and parking lots. In other words, they’re going to put solar panels on top of all those buildings and parking structures.
I urge you to check out his TEDx talk and media appearances, which have established him as a leading voice for biomimicry and nature-based innovation. We’ll talk with Colin about what the Net Zero Accelerator has learned from placing pilots across wildly different contexts—from converting unrecyclable plastic into construction blocks in Boise to optimizing HVAC systems across New York City buildings and even to coating Hollywood soundstage parking lots with reflective pavement.
And we’ll dig into why business model innovation may matter more than, for instance, better insulation for scaling net-zero businesses, what founders in the green building sector consistently get wrong about going to market, as well as what biomimicry can teach us about building resilient companies, not just resilient buildings.
You can learn more about the Net Zero Accelerator at NetZeroAccelerator.org. After mentoring over 100 climate tech companies, what has Colin Mangham learned about what separates founders who break through from the ones who stall out? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome to the show, Colin. How you doing today?
Colin Mangham 3:25
I’m actually doing great here in soon-to-be-sunny Southern California, and it’s a great start to my day here.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:31
Well, great. I’m glad to have you here. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. I wanted to talk about the Net Zero Accelerator and what led the US Green Building Council of California to decide to not just teach people to do pitches or demo days, but actually launch pilots. Why is that the right way to move us faster towards net-zero solutions for the built environment?
Colin Mangham 3:52
Well, the first thing is, I like that you said “not just,” because some of those things are sort of mandatory—to help guide pitch sessions and to demonstrate to an audience, right?
But really what happened was, we were looking at, as a community-based nonprofit, the work we were doing—and we still do, of course, on a larger scale now. USGBC California started as USGBC LA when we started the accelerator in 2019. But as a community-based nonprofit largely focused on advocating green building practice, we were looking at it and there seems to be a gap that we could bridge between technology and advocacy, or vice versa. And so that was the first impetus for this.
But really the thing that has stuck with it all along is we’ve got a community of change-makers. We’ve got a community of potential pilot partners. We have a community of advisors and subject matter experts, and frankly, people who are sustainability geeks and nerds like we are that really have a passion for this stuff. We said, “Hey, who out there in our community will raise your hand and help this young company get some validation and get a foothold and prove their concept?” And then, by virtue of that, you’re actually helping us help you and help all of us, right? You know, implement technologies that are necessary for scaling adoption of green building technologies and solutions.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:19
I’m actually hearing systems thinking, even in the design of the accelerator, which I’ve been involved in several of those, and it’s that promise that we’re going to make the connection to customers, basically, that a lot of them hold up and never deliver on—and you’re able to do that.
Colin Mangham 5:34
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we operate in a system, and a lot of my worldview is kind of like looking at biological systems. And so a system-based approach that doesn’t really include the various players and how you position on that landscape… and I can get to some of my marketing background in that regard, but really looking at stakeholder engagement and understanding that there are ways that you need to move within the system.
A lot of the system, frankly, can be regulatory. It can be things that just aren’t easy. There are a lot of headwinds. But these are natural constraints. And I will say this, with a background in creativity and design practice: when we have the constraints and restraints that we see in getting novel solutions into market, it forces us to be more creative.
So we do have to think about how it works within a system. We have to think about how—whenever you talk about scaling something, it’s going to fail on the backs of, frankly, other people and organizations. And so we’re different in that respect, because we began as a community-based nonprofit looking at how we might accelerate change.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:51
You just mentioned your background in biomimicry and nature-based solutions—and by the way, folks, check out Colin’s TEDx talk called Find Your Woods. It’s really interesting. But how does that thinking shape how you advise companies, and not just in terms of their product design, but their business strategy?
Colin Mangham 7:06
It’s funny, because it’s like I can’t unsee biomimicry once I’ve seen it. And I had the great honor and privilege of working with Janine Benyus, who is the matriarch, so to speak, the mother of modern biomimicry. And so what we learned there was—it’s a similar audience for biomimicry as with USGBC California, which is a lot of architects, engineers, designers.
And so what we found was that there’s a lot of people that, if they hit a wall and they can’t find the inspiration, or they’re trying to create something completely from scratch—which, you know, everything is iterative, right?—then they can look to the natural world to say, “All right, well, how do I shortcut to get to a solution?” Because there are a lot of things that have been around for a whole bunch of years that have stood the test of time.
And so, to your question about how I look at it as I guide people looking to do business model innovation: really, I think about beavers. I spent a good amount of time in Colorado. One of my moments that really got me into this business, so to speak, was walking irrigation ditches in Colorado, looking for beaver dams. Because if there’s a beaver dam, it blows out the ditch, and if in Aspen, Colorado, it blows out an irrigation ditch, it may blow out a really expensive house down the hill. And so where I discovered this, I found a lot of love for beavers.
And what I discovered in biomimicry, to the question, is that beavers are keystone species. By building their homes, they create habitat for others. And so this is the thing that I often remind business people: this thing that you’re creating—remember, it’s back to your acknowledgment of the system—it’s also creating, and it should create, better living environments for the people and, frankly, the other neighboring organisms all around you.
So really thinking about making sure that the externalities, the other impacts—the direct impacts is what a lot of founders certainly focus on: “Here’s how I can impact this person or this organization or this watershed or this building.” But really thinking about the broader implications and the ripple effects is important in biomimicry thinking.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:31
You’re making a really important point, which is: when you’re building a business, you’re building a setting for others to have an opportunity to experience some abundance that you’re sharing with them, but it’s a reciprocal thing. And a lot of the time, everybody looks at it only in terms of what they can get from someone else. A system is a much more complex and interactive experience.
How do you think about designing a business model for a new company when they come to the accelerator? And maybe using the example of resilience as a service as the business model—how did you come up with that approach?
Colin Mangham 10:04
The first thing is, through the biomimicry lens—or, frankly, a whole bunch of different goggles—resilience, and how we define resilience, is having really a Plan B, a Plan C, and having multiple approaches to achieve the same goal. If you think about resilience as a service, you’re really providing—if you’re the resilience service provider—someone or something multiple options to achieve success.
And so when we talk about resilience as a service, I’ll say one thing we advise certainly young founders on is not to present your solution as a silver bullet. And really, this is a fun one: not to say, “We’re going to disrupt markets.” People, frankly, they don’t want disruption. There’s enough uncertainty. A lot of times they’re clinging to their jobs. There’s a human factor involved, right?
And so what you’re providing them is some confidence in the ability to make sure it happens, even if you hit some bumps along the way. But that’s resilience—it is defined as multiple ways to achieve the same goal.
And so what we do is give them that perspective, but at the same time, in terms of business model innovation relative to the green space, the sustainability space, is also to look off-balance-sheet for where there is an exchange of value. And I define business in general—it’s not like I discovered it—but if you just look at it, business is meant to be an exchange of value. All of our economies, over all of time, have been based on some sort of exchange of value, right?
And so where it has really been strongest is where there’s reciprocity. Resilience and reciprocity, resilience and mutualism, symbiosis, if we use the biological terms—where there’s an honest, good, valuable, fair exchange, that’s where we really look for our founders to look again off-balance-sheet: an exchange of goodwill, exchange of knowledge, exchange of relationships, exchange of just even feel-good.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:03
All the externalities that traditional accounting ignored.
Colin Mangham 12:07
It completely ignores. And it’s why—this is where the real business model innovation can and should happen. And it’s why, you know, I know that ESG gets kind of a bad rap in certain circles, capital circles in particular. And I won’t go into all the acronyms that are on a short list or a hot list.
But the fact of the matter is that there is a community, there is a world, there is an ecosystem, there is an environment, and again, neighboring species that provide ecosystem services to us that allow us to do our business. Without them you wouldn’t have a business. And frankly, Mitch, you got me riffing here, but the fact is, if there weren’t things to fix, you also wouldn’t have a business. So be okay with there being problems in the world, because otherwise we’d all just kind of sit around and do nothing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:55
Well, new solutions are the basis for innovation, and we often talk about the desire for innovation without thinking about the fact that you have to be looking into these new niches. So as you think about accelerating the transition to a sustainable built environment, what are the key industries to focus on? What are the key species?
Colin Mangham 13:15
Well, I’ll go back to what we call the AEC—so that’s architects, engineers, and construction, sort of like contractors, et cetera. And all those in the built environment are serving the property owners, et cetera, and eventually, certainly, the residents. We look a lot at occupant health.
That AEC—the architects, the engineers, and the people that are building things or retrofitting things—they’re the front end of a process that really has an impact over many, many years, right? So if you build a building, you would hope, we would hope, that’s going to be good, solid building stock for 50, 60, 100 years, right? And so same thing with an architect: you’re on screen, you’re on paper, you’re on site, looking at what can be there, what should be there, what is beautiful there, that has both form and function.
And so the reason I mentioned that is it’s important with that leverage point early in the design, or the rethinking, the retrofitting of buildings, that these people who are at that phase are involved in sustainability, because they’re thinking about the long term at the beginning of a cycle. And the most sustainable buildings are, frankly, the ones we keep in use.
I mean, the Bradbury Building here—if you’re a fan of Blade Runner—I think it was 1893 here in Los Angeles, and they’ve retrofitted that thing, and it’s one of the most sustainable buildings in the city. 1893, and it looks it, in the coolest of ways. But again, the thing is that this audience has a large impact on things that will be sitting for a long, long time. So it is the real leverage point, and that’s what we focus on.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:16
I’ve seen this. I’ve been on both sides of this conversation. You find a reason to say no, just to move on.
Let me ask about a particular example of a startup that you work with that involved creating a system. So this is ByFusion. They make construction-grade blocks from unrecyclable plastic, and that produces 83% lower emissions than concrete alternatives. The pilot, though, required you to get the City of Boise, Dow Reynolds Consumer Products, and the Hefty Renew program—where they process bags into, in this case, bricks—all together to work this out. How did you get that group into a room and start the conversation across all of those single-point-of-need problems that those participants represented?
Colin Mangham 20:01
It’s actually one of my favorite stories, and not just because you presented it here, but it’s a great company, partly because they were one of our first—they were one of our guinea pigs, if I could say that—in 2019, and they’ve really evolved along the way.
What I will say is, first of all, we didn’t broker the Boise pilot. What we did was, importantly, we guided a Los Angeles-based company in how to go about maybe getting a pilot study outside of the City of LA, even though we very much wanted it in the City of LA, in a pilot market that could be applicable to a whole bunch of markets around the country, including in Los Angeles communities, right?
And so what we advocated is certainly some of what we talked about previously, which is product-market fit, right? In systems. This word has come up continually in our conversation—the system in Boise, for ByFusion, was that we need certainty in feedstock. In their case, it’s unrecyclable or not-easily-recyclable plastic, right? So if they don’t have that feedstock to create that block, and didn’t consistently know it’s going to show up, and consistently know it’s going to be exactly what they need—if they don’t have that, then they’ve got a challenge.
And so that’s where Hefty Renew really helped them. Hefty Renew already had a relationship with those homeowners, for example. And so here again, stakeholders and system in place. So how do you get the stuff? If ByFusion had gone out and said, “All right, we’re going to go knock on doors and collect all that,” they would have failed. But somebody was there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:30
And there was a pyrolysis plant in Boise that they were able to use too, so all the pieces of the solution were there. That’s the other interesting point about that project.
Colin Mangham 21:38
Yeah, you’re exactly right, especially because a lot of times we see that sort of piggybacking, co-location, especially in manufacturing facilities. Like, we’ve got some that are working with insulation right now that are co-located at a facility where it’s not competitive, but it’s adjacent enough that you can put something in that 100 square feet over in the corner, and it’s not going to disrupt the system. But there’s some other thing happening there—and in that case, pyrolysis—that can be applied to what you’re doing.
And so, you know, maybe it’s how things are moved in and out, off the loading guard. Maybe it’s the temperature and humidity control in the space. There’s a variety of things—storage is a big aspect. But how they were able to find a facility there where they didn’t have to build this stuff is also really important.
And so it’s interesting, because then you think, “Well, if you can just plug and play so easily, what’s your intellectual property there?” Then it comes to a system—we talk about value-added resellers. They’re very much one. They’ve combined all these things, this technology and this system, into something that really works.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:45
Now, one of the interesting things about that project, too, is that they actually underestimated how much they would be able to process profitably. What is a pilot that overperforms telling us? Does it mean that sustainability-focused companies often underestimate their opportunity?
Colin Mangham 23:02
That one’s hit or miss, because I think some actually overestimate, because they think, “This is going to save the world. How can my total addressable market not be massive, right?”
In ByFusion’s case, I think they did what I tend to advocate across the board, which is under-promise and over-deliver. And it’s not to set yourself—I mean, look, 80 tons versus 72 tons—those are still big amounts, right? But what it tells them is, “All right, well, there’s something that works well here.” And if I go back to nature, nature replicates things that work. Failures are fossils.
And so what they need to do is—it’s not a post-mortem, that’s not the right word for something as wonderful as what they pulled off—but to kind of go back and say, “What? Why did that work?” And this is where the real honesty needs to come in for an entrepreneur, because you also can’t say, “Well, we’re always going to get that.” It may have been very specific to that particular pilot. Now you want to go replicate those conditions, right? But it doesn’t mean you’re going to over-deliver every time just because of that one pilot. So that’s also the danger of a highly successful first pilot.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:14
Also the case with any ecosystem. I put a different species into the same type of ecosystem, and it may not perform the same. Lots to talk about here, but we need to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to be right back. Stay tuned.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to the conversation with Colin Mangham. He’s Chief Experience Officer at the Net Zero Accelerator, a program of the US Green Building Council of California.
Colin, you’ve talked in the past about how 21st-century performance-based business models are stuck in 20th-century formats. And when you look at, say, for instance, ByFusion, like we were just talking about—what does that shift from product selling to system selling look like in practice for a founder who hasn’t made that leap? How do you articulate the challenge they face?
Colin Mangham 25:05
You know, it is funny even to hear you say it. I feel like even referring to the 21st century and 20th century feels a little 20th century, but we’re 26 years in, and we’re still kind of learning the same lessons.
The lesson, especially for founders—and a lot of what we’ve talked about here—people that are technologists, and then they’ve really geeked out in the most awesome of ways on their solution, they really look at features, and maybe not features and benefits. And so 20th century, it was more about features and benefits. It wasn’t really about the systems, and it certainly wasn’t about owning and being accountable for the performance of things. We didn’t talk about circularity in these types of things.
But the difference is product-market fit needs to engage with stakeholders. This is a differentiator for us: that there are people that you may not even be selling to that will be affected by this. And it’s not all features and benefits. So that’s the main shift.
Looking from, let’s say, these diagrams and schematics of competitive landscapes—I lean towards looking at the competitive landscape as a map of not just competitors and latent competitors, meaning they could be a competitor once they see what I’m doing, but also co-opetition opportunities. What looks like a competitor actually could be a partner, and looking at it as a landscape, as a map, versus looking at your typical X and Y axis of “Here’s our features and benefits,” or our side-by-side comparison with all the check boxes, like “We do all these things”—people are overwhelmed with that. They want to know how it kind of works within their current network.
And I’ll give you one example as recent as yesterday. One of our companies is having a challenge selling into a certain audience set, not because of features and benefits, not because the ROI is—it’s incredible—but because that particular audience does not want to disrupt a 20-year relationship they’ve had with Steve. And that’s just a factor they have to kind of work with. Again, it’s the system that they’ve got to work within.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:11
It’s always a people problem at the end of the day. I mean, as much as we talk about the technology, I want to turn to another example of your work: Feedback Solutions. So this is a technology that sounds really simple. It’s a people-counting sensor that optimizes HVAC ventilation in a building in real time based on who’s in the building or how many people are in the building.
And they tried this out across three very different settings: a big office complex, a nursing school, and a library at Fordham University. Like we were talking about a few minutes ago, there are different settings for the same solution. What’s the benefit of testing one solution in multiple places, and how did you bring that group of pilot sites together for the company?
Colin Mangham 27:55
Well, the benefit—and again, I’ll do this through the marketing lens—a lot of times we’ll talk about an A/B test. And frankly, when we talk about pilots in marketing and advertising and product launches, right? And that’s what I spent a lot of the early part of my career with. You look and you say, “All right, well, if it works in Austin, will it also work in Boston?” And Austin and Boston are completely different in many ways. If it works in Austin, it might actually work just as well in Seattle. Now there’s adjacency there. If it works in LA, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work in New York, right?
And so it’s really testing out replicability, and that’s really what entrepreneurship is anyway. If you’re going to put the effort into it and you’re going to scale the adoption of it, you want to first find something that you can replicate over and over and over again.
And so what they did there was they looked not only at the building typologies—different types of buildings, especially like between a library and commercial real estate, right, mixed use—but they also looked at the occupants. A library will have people there on a Saturday. A commercial office building will probably not. A nursing school would have different traffic on different days.
What we’re looking at is: how, if we can figure this out across A, B, and C, then we can replicate A, B, and C when we go after more A’s, more B’s, and more C’s at the same time. In the pilot case, they may also say, “Well wait, C is not as attractive and not as defensible and efficacious and replicable as we thought it was going to be. We need to focus on A and B.”
And so really, that’s a big part of it, especially when you’ve got limited resources, limited time—you’re a relatively young company, growth stage—figuring out where you need to apply those resources. And again, the one-two punch here is: what can I replicate, and what am I replicating off of, and what should I prioritize in terms of where I should really be selling this solution?
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:58
Well, and it’s also the quality of the owners of those settings for the pilot that matters. And there’s another example. You have ePAVE, which is a company that makes a patented reflective pavement coating that preserves asphalt and concrete. But they had a problem. Their first implementation for Hudson Pacific Properties didn’t work. They actually had to redo it, but that ultimately led to the real estate firm getting more involved. What’s the lesson about failure and transparency, about how a pilot might go sideways, that sets the stage for that kind of cooperation and growth in a relationship?
Colin Mangham 30:34
This is a funny conversation, Mitch, because I’m realizing how much my worldview is through the marketing lens. I think about raving fans. I think about the complaint that comes in that you can solve, and now they’re a fan for life—or for at least a while—versus the complaint you never hear about, right? And I’d rather hear from the person who has a challenge that I can solve and I plan for solving, than not hear from them again.
If that failure had happened and they said, “All right, well, thank you. No, thank you. We’re going to dig this up. See you later”—that would not have been good. But in this case, the interesting thing is that it wasn’t a failure of the product; it was a failure of the application.
And so what happened there, which I think is frankly quite brilliant: A, it was immediate transparency. They said, “All right, well, no, we’re going to fix this. And this wasn’t expected, but not totally unexpected.” The difference here is they framed it as not a faulty product, but a precision product that needs to be applied in a certain way, because this is a highly engineered product that, for it to do what we promised it will do, it needs to be applied in a certain way. And let’s try another group, and let’s do this right. And that’s what they did.
And so the opportunity actually helped them to reframe the quality of the solution and the efficaciousness and the technology—the greatness of the technology. So again, not a faulty product, but a precision product, and it just needs a little more care for it to do what it needs to do.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:07
This has been a great exploration of what it takes to launch a company. And I want to ask about the 2025 cohort at the Net Zero Accelerator. You’ve got everything from wildfire resilience to digital twins and circular construction models. Now that you’ve had more than 100 companies go through the program, what do you think the most underappreciated category of net-zero innovation is, based on the experience that you’ve had?
Colin Mangham 32:32
I’d say water use and water conservation. And the answer I’m giving is informed partly because we’re running an architectural design challenge right now on residential water use—the future of water use at home.
And I mentioned water because I recently heard someone say—and I’d love to quote it as my own, but I’m not going to—but they said, “Hey, what do you call it when the power goes out? Well, we call it a blackout, right? And we have a term for that. What do you call it when the water stops flowing?” We don’t have a term for that, because it doesn’t happen.
The cost of water, the assumption of water, puts it in a category where people don’t really pay attention as much as they could and I think should. Two things: I worked on Live Earth with Al Gore, leading up to COP 21—it’s been over a decade now. And there was a conversation around water conservation in LA, and a person at the table said, “Colin, no one in Los Angeles is going to care about water conservation until they turn the tap and nothing comes out.” And so people don’t think about it that much.
And the reason I present it as a big opportunity for net zero is what we don’t think about is the water-energy-carbon nexus, as we call it. It takes energy to move water, to heat water. And so if we can reduce our use of water, we can reduce our heating of water, transport of water. It’s an energy-efficiency play at the core.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:03
So as you think about household water use and the design of the home, is it more about capturing rainwater and using as much of that for non-potable uses? Where’s that headed?
Colin Mangham 34:17
It’s certainly interesting. And to pull from the biomimicry playbook, we look at solutions that are locally attuned, right? And all of life that is still here adapts and evolves to wherever that life lives. And so I mentioned that because we’re here in Southern California, we’re finally out of drought—I think it’s the first time in 25 years or so. But we’re not really a rainy environment like, let’s say, Seattle. Although, Mitch, I’ve been told that people in Seattle—it doesn’t actually rain there, they just say that so Californians will stop moving there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:50
When I lived there, that was true. But it does rain there.
Colin Mangham 34:54
So, is the greatest impact I can have on my water use in my home capturing rainwater and using it as gray water, probably for landscaping, these types of things? Maybe not. But is the cost of doing it as part of my solution fairly low? Sure. And so I think we need to look at a variety of things.
One thing that happens here is you get into habits, and one of the habits, especially in Los Angeles, is you forget that your landscaping system—and people love their landscapes here—you didn’t tweak the settings on your sprinklers for winter, and you’re overwatering, just because you didn’t think about it, and because it runs at 5 a.m.
And so there’s just things that we’re trying to do behaviorally with people to say, “Hey, have you thought about this?” And I’ll add this, because I think it’s an overarching principle with everything we’re talking about here: a lot of people just don’t want the data. Like, if you tell me, “Hey, Colin, take a five-minute shower versus a 10-minute shower, and you will reduce GHGs by this”—I’m like… how about, “Hey, Colin, I know you do all your thinking in the shower, but what if you did some of your thinking on a walk outside and took a shorter shower?” Oh, that makes more sense to me.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:06
Well, living on a well and next to a river, I’ve discovered after leaving the city that the water cycle is like a wild animal. And to the whole nature of the conversation we’re having, it’s starting to see yourself in a bigger system. And those homeowners in LA who are watering all year round when they shouldn’t be are an example of a set of—we’ve talked about it before—20th-century ways of thinking. It’s like, “Oh, I can turn it on, I can leave it on. I don’t have to worry about it.” But the cost of water is going up. The availability of water is falling. It’s a different time.
If a climate tech founder is listening to this right now and they’re sitting on maybe even a validated pilot, but they’re struggling to scale it up, what would you tell them about how to think about their business before they try to raise another dollar or pitch another customer? What should they just stop and do?
Colin Mangham 36:56
The first thing I would ask is, “All right, well, who did you validate it with? And why did you validate it? How was it validated?” And the “who” part really goes back to the whole thread here, which is the system.
So if you validated a pilot with a partner, two things. One is, what was the intent of that? And then, largely, the intent is to communicate that validation to be able to ease up and soften up the additional sales, right? And so can you get that partner that you validated with, and apparently had success with, to sing your praises? That’s the first thing. That’s the networking effect.
Even more directly, if you validated with them, focus on further implementing it with them. And this is what we talk about in terms of pilots in general. Pilots for us is not about, “Does this thing work? I don’t know. I got my prototype. Let’s hope, and we’ll learn.” It’s more about, “Hey, this thing does work, and if I put it in Building One with, let’s say, a REIT, and it’s validated, then they’ll be like, ‘Oh, okay, let’s put it in Buildings Two through Ten.’” And that’s really it. Replicating successes.
So if you validated it, what was your plan for repeating that validation with that validating partner? And what can be your plan moving forward to get them to speak on behalf of you in some way? Case studies, as simple as it is, are highly useful.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:33
Transforming the built economy requires that we recalibrate business systems within technological systems within a natural system. That’s a lot of complexity. How do you see us making progress towards a sustainable built environment before potentially disastrous warming is locked in? Are we going to make it?
Colin Mangham 38:55
This is what we call a pregnant pause. Are we going to make it? I don’t know. Should we not try to make it? Absolutely not. We’ve got to keep going. We’ve got one.
And so I would think about things like, can we turn this thing around? For example, there are some big corporations that could be more sustainable, and those are big battleships that I talk about—turning them around a little bit and heading in a different direction. Can we turn the economy around in time? Can we turn global warming down in time? I don’t know if we can turn it around. I do think we can tack the sailboat left and right a little bit. This is what we call in biomimicry the dynamic equilibrium. Things are always in flux. We’re always going to be having gains, and we have steps forward, steps back.
But the thing that I would like to turn around, the thing I would like to go back to that would help us to get there in time, as you said, is—really, frankly, I’m going to be contrarian here—some 20th-century thinking. Which is, the solar business came out of abundance. If you’ve got sunlight, why not use it? If you’ve got flowing water, use it. If you’ve got people, leverage that. And if you’ve got time as a young entrepreneur or a college student, leverage that and turn that into money, I guess, if that’s the thing that certainly fuels it.
But really, I think we need to go back to just looking at innovation as like, “Why not?” And I know a lot of it’s gotten politicized. But where has it gone, that we said, “Hey, we’re American. We’re real Americans, and we can do things better.” Where’s the “do better”? And we need more of that.
Inevitably, and this is how we position it with a lot of our entrepreneurs: it’s not about the hugging of the tree, but that tree is going to do better because of this. But the economics of the solution, the ROI, the lack of disruption, the speed to market, the replicability, the job creation—all these different things are the things that red and blue can agree on. And it just happens that I would have a hard time thinking about anything that can be affected by biomimicry thinking or any sustainability thinking where you optimize something, where you gain efficiencies, that doesn’t have some sort of positive environmental effect.
So let’s focus on those things. Let’s look at things as advocate entrepreneurs. Lean into frustration. Doesn’t mean you’ve got to walk around angry all day, but look at the things that aren’t working and fuel that. The greatest entrepreneurs—and this is another thing for our young companies—are the ones that say, “You know what, if someone is not making that and I want that, I’m going to make that. And there’s got to be other people like me out there.” But that fuels them to create a solution that is quality, because they want it for themselves. That’s where a lot of amazing ideas come out. And they’re dedicated. They’re passionate about it. They’re hyper-focused on it. They’re on the leading edge, bleeding edge, and they create novel solutions that others like them will eventually want. But they create quality solutions because they’re fueled by saying, “Why can’t we do better?”
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:04
If I may—my response, and I’d love to hear your thoughts: it seems the problem, to me, is a systems problem—that some people see systems and some don’t. In other words, they’re exclusionary. And the problem, ultimately, is that red-and-blue divide is a refusal to see a bigger “we,” to recognize the full system we live in, and try to assert a particular perspective on the world. How do you get through that? You’re a marketing guy.
Colin Mangham 42:28
There’s too much talk of storytelling, but I do like a good story, and how I often do it—I’ll give you two things.
One is, I recently said, “Hey, let’s look at red and blue through—those, you and I remember—the stereoscopic 3D glasses, right? Red lens and a blue lens.” And when you put them together, red and blue, and you looked at the picture, you’re like, “Oh, now I see all the depth.” And so I like to think about: if you combine red and blue, you don’t get brown—you get depth.
And I like to think about, when we talk about biodiversity relative to diversity across the board—cultural, et cetera—diversity is really the currency of our exchange. In some cases, if, Mitch, you and I are selling the same thing, there’s no exchange here. But if we see the world differently, we provide something to the world that’s different, then we can have that mutualism. We can have that exchange, that value exchange. And so that’s part of it. I really think that what we need to do is look through that red and blue lens.
And the story I will tell is: I was in Houston a couple of years ago, gave a keynote to a lot of energy companies. And I put a picture of a tree up on my slides, and I said, “All right, I can see an amazing carbon sink here. Trees—love trees for that, right? Oxygen, fantastic. But you may see a deer stand at your hunting camp. Can’t we just both love the tree?”
Mitch Ratcliffe 44:01
Colin, there’s a lot to unpack and continue to explore. How can listeners follow your work and the work of the Net Zero Accelerator and the US Green Building Council of California?
Colin Mangham 44:10
Well, first of all, I think I’m fairly easy to find, so if you search me, you’ll find things related to the biomimicry that I talked about, and thank you for mentioning the TED talk. I feel like it was a decade ago, so I feel like there’s a lot of things I would change. But still, the topic is evergreen, right?
But yeah, if you go to USGBC-CA.org—that’s our mothership—and in there you can also get to NetZeroAccelerator.org, which is where the accelerator lives in a microsite with a whole bunch of frankly fascinating companies. So I do invite you to have a look there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 44:52
Well, Colin, thanks for taking a trip through the systems with us. We really appreciate it. It’s been a fascinating conversation.
Colin Mangham 44:59
Thank you, Mitch. Thanks for drawing it out of me.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 45:06
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Colin Mangham. He is Chief Experience Officer of the Net Zero Accelerator, a program of the US Green Building Council of California. And you can learn more about the Net Zero Accelerator at NetZeroAccelerator.org, as well as about the US Green Building Council of California at USGBC-CA.org.
This conversation underscores, for me, why sustainability is poised for a much greater impact than we anticipate at the moment, despite all the pushback. After decades of talk, we’ve created a growing awareness—a vast swath of professionals that’s ready to converge on the challenge of building a sustainable, circular, and bio-based built environment, and the economic case for doing so. The pieces are in place, and the people needed to lead the way have arrived. They’re educated in recent science and recognize the economic opportunity is not just significant, but critical to maintaining a standard of living that we would all accept and enjoy.
And it’s not just architects and engineers anymore. Facilities managers, chief financial officers, materials scientists, pavement coating specialists, HVAC manufacturers, plastic processing entrepreneurs, water system designers, real estate portfolio managers, and marketing strategists have all come to recognize the threat from climate change and how making decisions can turn down the CO2 emissions that we must reduce.
Consider Colin’s background. He’s a four-time CMO who uses biomimicry to coach climate tech founders to succeed with pilot programs and then sell through the results to the market. That’s a portfolio career if I’ve ever heard one, and it’s this new combination of skills that allows each of us to begin to enter into systems thinking and work together to create a new reality.
The net-zero built environment needs every discipline at the table, because it’s a systems problem that requires process changes to transform engineering feats into enduring business and governmental practices that change the shape of our everyday lives—and change them for the better.
Colin’s point that systems-based solutions demand a different sales pitch than Silicon Valley has taught us is critical. People don’t want disruption. They want a consistent, predictable outcome. And that human factor is the reality that climate tech founders, who lead with “We’re going to disrupt your market,” need to internalize, or they will find themselves handing time-impoverished executives a reason to say no, because they’re talking about too much unfocused change. Give them a very well-defined opportunity to improve their lives and their business performance, and you will find that people will listen and buy in.
I mean, consider ByFusion, for example. It’s a company that turns unrecyclable plastic into construction-grade blocks. They didn’t succeed by disrupting anything. Instead, they succeeded by plugging into what already existed: Hefty’s Renew collection network, a pyrolysis facility in Boise, Idaho, and a willing municipal partner ready to foot the bill to try the thing out. They orchestrated a community of stakeholders, over-delivered on their pilot, and improved the system—not just the technology. It worked. They created a predictable, repeatable outcome that disruption-first sales strategies don’t.
And finally, let’s talk about Colin’s challenge at the end, and it deserves our attention: what has happened to the “we can do better together” mentality? The most durable innovations in nature aren’t the flashiest—they’re the ones that create habitat for others and new habits. So like beavers, nature’s engineers, who reshape a stream to create pools where fish can spawn, where crawdads can hang out during the summer, and where birds and wildlife can come to water.
Think in terms of how building your lodge—that is, your business—creates an environment for other organizations, while preserving nature’s ability to thrive within the space that you’ve entered. To build a business, create opportunity for others to enjoy long-term resilience and provide value to the community around you. Seeing the needs of others, even your American political enemies—which is a term I thought died with Richard Nixon—that these folks are critical to the system you want to build can actually unlock success, rather than create more friction between political perspectives.
As Colin said, we can put the red lens and the blue lens together to create deep pools of goodwill and shared prosperity, just like a healthy ecosystem. Red and blue, working together, seeing the full system rather than insisting on only one single point of view, is how we can begin to revitalize this country—create the compromise that builds things our great-grandchildren will be proud to inherit.
So stay tuned. There are going to be a lot more conversations with people making sustainability happen, and you will find them here on Sustainability In Your Ear. And I hope you’ll take a moment to share one of the conversations in our archive of more than 540 episodes with a friend or a member of your family. Send just one link to get the conversation with them started.
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Thanks for your support. We appreciate it. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.