Speed & Scale with Ryan from Kleiner Perkins
Against the backdrop of COP27 unfolding in Egypt, your ReFi Podcast hosts John and Simar sit down this week for a timely conversation with Ryan Panchadsaram.
Ryan is an engineer and investor focused on solving systemic societal challenges at US venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. There, he works as technical advisor to the chairman, John Doerr, investing in disruptive founders and technologies working on solutions to the climate crisis. Ryan is also the co-author of Doerr's 2018 national bestseller Speed & Scale, and previously collaborated on Doerr's bestseller Measure What Matters. In March 2020, Ryan co-founded US Digital Response, a nonprofit that helps organizations respond more efficiently and effectively to emerging public needs. Previously, Ryan championed entrepreneurship, innovation, and open data as Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration.
The Challenge
While the urgency of climate action has never been more clear, empowering impactful collective action remains a significant challenge. Where solutions exist, social and financial barriers to achieving meaningful scale can often get in the way.
As 27 COP meetings have demonstrated, implementing and managing climate solutions is much more challenging than simply agreeing that action is required or establishing commitments to act.
Ryan's Thoughts and Approach
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, an outcomes management tool discussed in depth in Measure What Matters. They address the critical facets of any goal worth achieving: the “what” and the “how.” Objectives are what you aim to accomplish. Key Results (KRs) tell us how the objectives get done.
If any goal could be considered "worth achieving", solving the climate crisis would certainly qualify. In the interview with John and Simar, Ryan explains how applying OKR's to the climate crisis is introduced in the Speed & Scale book - which ultimately generated 10 separate objectives and 55 associated key results, all explorable in the online tracker here.
Listen to the full conversation above to learn more about Ryan, how Kleiner Perkins is helping to accelerate and scale up climate solutions, and hear his thoughts on everything from carbon markets to the future of money will shape a sustainable planet going forward.
