If you frequent LinkedIn, a post from Team for the Planet must have slipped into your thread already. The company co-founded by Nicolas Sabatier, Mehdi Coly, Laurent Morel, Denis Galha Garcia and Arthur Aubœuf wants to use entrepreneurship to fight against global warming. How ? By investing in “global innovations against greenhouse gases”. Team for the Planet has already raised 23 million euros in funds and for nine innovationsan investment has been validated.
Unknown to the general public, this investment fund in the service of the climate emergency will experience in the coming months an XXL media exposure. Collective We Sail for People and Planet has chosen to put his name on one of the two boats he is entering in the Vendée Globe 2024, the second sailboat will bear the name of the Entourage association fighting for the inclusion of isolated people in precariousness.
Arthur Aubœuf, one of the co-founders of the citizen fund, explains to 20 minutes how he counts on the Vendée Globe to fight against global warming.
What difference does it make for Team for the Planet to find itself on Sam Goodchild’s sail for the Vendée Globe 2024?
Many things. Today, we are a niche movement, very well known on LinkedIn, by a socio-professional category. We need to make ourselves known on a much larger scale. Because to have a big impact, a big network, we must all act together. The collective is essential, it makes all the difference. Being on a boat in the Vendée Globe is a megaphone. At the end of the race [janvier 2025], we want to be 250,000 associates. We start from 120,000, there is a margin.
What good will it do you to have so many associates?
The network effect allows us to find innovations from patients all over the world. Often it is neither scientists nor engineers, but people from the general public who come back to us with projects. Today, we have 7,000 volunteer evaluators, “Mr. and Mrs. Everybody”, who give some of their time on an online platform to help select innovations. Every quarter, we have a Top 10 of projects that goes before a scientific committee of fourteen multidisciplinary experts from major institutions (CNRS, INRAE, European Commission, etc.). They decide by consensus, which innovations move on to the next step. It’s the butcher’s shop. (smile) Of the ten, two or even three pass. Come after the economic tests to validate the fact that there is a real market. Candidate entrepreneurs wanting to bring these innovations must prove to us that there are real purchase intentions. It allows us to test the project and the contractor. Being numerous means that we automatically have more innovations, we select the best ones, we find better entrepreneurs and once we have invested in companies, we find customers more easily, talents, notoriety.
How did you get into the We Sail for People and Planet project?
By Alexandre Fayeulle [PDG d’Advens, une entreprise de cybersécurité], a seriously ill, a visionary. One of our historical investors connected us to him. At the first meeting, he said to us: “Would you like to be in the Vendée Globe? »
It came out of nowhere, we almost wondered if the guy wasn’t trying to get us a mytho from space.
He invited us to Lorient, where the boats are, we met everyone, we went boating and he told us: “I am very serious, my goal, my vision, is that sport serves to expedite cases. We agreed on the speech. If only the power of sport served the common good rather than just entertainment, it would be insane!
And Alexandre Fayeulle added 5 million euros to your fund!
At the start, he “simply” wanted to give us a boat in the Vendée Globe. Then, he imagined bringing companies into a collective that would pool their resources to accelerate economic and social transition. When he imagined this fund, he said to himself that he needed something concrete: “In addition to the boat in the Vendée Globe, I’m going to invest 5 million euros. “It’s a crazy thing, you have to realize that he only invests to climate dividends, i.e. tonnes of CO2 not emitted or captured. There is no financial return, no tax exemption. It’s huge, especially a sum like that.
How did you manage to convince other investors to put money into Team for the Planet without a dividend in return?
We tell them that it is because there is no dividend that we will succeed in fighting climate change on a large scale. What we are selling to our shareholders is to free themselves from the constraint of shareholders who expect financial performance. We want to create a type of shareholding that is sincere and oriented towards extra-financial performance. How many times have I been told: “You are zadists! because it doesn’t fit into normal models. It gives us a capacity for action which is incredible because our shareholders, when they come to piss us off at general meetings, it’s because they want more impact, never because they want more money! We can therefore look for innovations that would never be financed by the traditional economic world.
But you are not limiting yourself to low-tech or even no-tech innovations, you are also moving towards high-tech, investments of several million euros.
Exactly, for us, all that matters is the impact. We can look for solutions that are already ready, deployable immediately, like CoolRoofbut also much longer-term stuff, for example Carbon Time. We put 1.5 million euros on this company. The idea is to very finely crush a volcanic rock with a very strong CO2 mineralizing power in the ocean. Its power to capture CO2 is much greater than planting trees. But around this project, there are scientific questions about ecotoxicity, the risk to biodiversity. We fund the achievement of international scientific consensus. We are not directly operational. Maybe in five years we will be able to be and if we are, this power of capture is insane. But no one would fund that.
With your shareholders, your experts, what control do you keep over the company in which you have invested?
In the shareholders’ pact, we impose two things, the choice of the leader. Often, it is engineers, researchers, scientists, and not entrepreneurs who lead the projects. Finding an economic model, transforming it into a business, is not their job. We find them very good contractors and impose them. Another obligation: Open Source [logiciel dont le code source est publiquement accessible]. The patent is used against the patent. We open the patent with a license that anyone can request. When we assign the license to someone, they can copy and paste the innovation in their country for free, commercialize it. In exchange, he has two duties: share with us his own improvements in innovation so that everyone can benefit from them and share with us his impact in tonnes of CO2.
Are project leaders who come to Team for the Planet easy to convince about Open Source? Or are they already convinced who come to you?
It’s a big bet. A lot of people were telling us, “It’s impossible, people aren’t going to do that. The reality is that they are arriving and they are very enthusiastic because they know that their market is nascent and therefore extremely fragile. If they go there alone, they have no chance of creating a buoyant market. So it needs to be densified. The example that comes up often is that of Elon Musk and his super chargers. They have cost him billions, the best on the market, but he knows that if he is alone in equipping the roads of the world, the electric car market will not be ready until 2035. However, he wants it to be ready now. For that, he put his superchargers under free license and today, most of the other manufacturers use them. They therefore participate in equipping the roads and the electricity market is ready. Musk is now the leader in this market. We use the same mechanics: our carriers prefer to have a small part of a very, very large market. And the second reason is that these people do it for the common good. Most of those who come to find Team for the Planet, it’s not to become a billionaire. They do not care. Of course, they want to earn some money and make it work. But the fact that it can really be used in the fight against global warming is what interests them in the first place.