My shift from technical solutions to climate finance and the missing-middle thesis

I came into climate work wanting to address immediate problems the way an engineer does, with technical knowledge and technical solutions. Over time, that changed. The more I worked, the more I saw that the harder problem usually wasn’t the technology. It was the absence of a market, and the appropriate capital to fund one. This realization has slowly solidified into the thing I want to build the next stretch of my work on.

It came into focus in a class at Kellogg, Navigating the Climate Transition, with Professors Meghan Busse and Dave Chen. Thinking through it there, I kept landing in the same place: the missing middle of climate finance. The proven-but-not-yet-bankable zone. Solutions that clearly work but don’t fit neatly into a venture return or an infrastructure fund, so the capital to build them at scale never quite shows up. I think that gap is where a lot of the real climate impact is won or lost.

It’s sharpest in the hard-to-decarbonize sectors, from steel and cement to shipping and aviation. These are some of the hardest challenges we have right now, and not because we lack the technology. They’re hard because they need long-term, committed capital solutions that don’t really exist yet, at least not at scale. They’re also the transitions capital is most nervous about. If these deals aren’t closed, the technology almost won’t matter.

That’s the thesis I’m setting out to explore. It’s why I’m at Kellogg concentrating in strategy and finance, and why I’m so excited to have been selected for the Abrams Climate Academy to work on a project to develop a framework to invest long-term capital in climate-forward businesses however they might show up. I’m building the investor-side fluency to help structure the deals that get these projects built.

The technology is largely here. The capital structures and effective business plans aren’t. Closing that gap is the work I’m setting out to do.