Course Overview & Details
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Presenter: Nancy Pfund, Founder and Managing Partner of DBL Partners, a pioneering impact venture capital firm spun out of JPMorgan in 2008. As one of the earliest investors in Tesla, SolarCity, and Pandora, Pfund is widely recognized as a trailblazer in double bottom line (DBL) investing, which prioritizes both market-leading financial returns and measurable social, economic, and environmental impact.
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Host Context: Stanford University graduate-level lecture for a curriculum focused on cleantech entrepreneurship, climate action, venture finance, and sustainable business, designed for students across engineering, business school, environmental science, and climate policy tracks.
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Session Format: 60-minute keynote presentation + 60-minute live audience Q&A, featuring firsthand venture capital war stories, market data on the renewable energy transition, deep dives into portfolio company case studies, and actionable guidance for aspiring cleantech entrepreneurs and investors.
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Core Audience: MBA and engineering grad students, early-stage cleantech founders, climate policy professionals, and impact investors.
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Central Thesis: Double bottom line investing is not a tradeoff between profit and purpose – it is a superior framework for building transformative, industry-defining companies. While mainstream Silicon Valley venture capital dismissed cleantech as too risky, capital-intensive, or unprofitable in the 2000s, early DBL investments in Tesla, SolarCity, and PowerLight delivered outsized financial returns while accelerating the global energy transition, creating millions of high-quality jobs, and advancing environmental justice. The cleantech industry has reached an irreversible inflection point, and the next wave of innovation will be defined by distributed, transparent, customer-centric solutions that decarbonize the global economy while lifting up communities.
