Climate CEOs: Scaling Startups Deep Tech Insights: Investor with $500M+ of Assets | Tom Chi, At One Ventures
Mar 2, 2026
Tom Chi, founding partner at At One Ventures and author of Climate Capital, is a former Google X product leader turned climate investor. He discusses using physics and unit economics to evaluate deep tech, minimizing integration risk in physical systems, investing criteria for seed/Series A climate startups, and practical founder skills for faster iteration and scale.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Use Matter Energy Time Space To Vet Physical Tech
- Assess physical startups by four physics attributes: matter, energy, time, and space to find a 2x–10x advantage on unit economics.
- Be explicit about which cost bucket (feedstock, processing, transport) the win targets to prove commercial viability quickly.
Cheapest Unit Economics Often Become The Default
- Winning physical businesses usually capture whole industries by delivering the cheapest unit economics with a new dominant machine or process.
- Unlike discretionary software choices, the lowest-cost production method becomes the default and displaces incumbents fast.
Win By Cutting Integration Costs As Well As Opex
- To displace incumbents, optimize two things: dramatically better unit economics and dramatically lower integration costs.
- Lower integration cost means minimizing installation downtime, specs mismatch, testing, and unexpected civil or capex work.
