From Australia’s Energy Sector to scaling Unicorns. Albert Bielinko discusses the challenges for residential adoption of renewable energy and gives us an insight into what it takes to build and scale a unicorn. 

Ep.#84  Albert Bielinko @ Telstra Ventures - Tech4Climate Podcast by Startup basecamp

PART 1: Meet the investor

On today’s podcast I had the pleasure of meeting with Albert Bielinko, Partner at Telstra Ventures. A very exciting firm that has invested in 91 tech-enabled companies of which 15 have become unicorns. Their focus is one post revenue Series A to Series C, writing 3 to 12mil USD on initial cheques and working closely with founders to grow their businesses. 

Albert talks very fondly of his two young daughters and makes sure he spends lots of time with his family, in his spare time he enjoys running and football. He describes himself as a geek regularly reading and researching about the energy transition. Albert was very early to the food delivery space, starting a business with some friends in 2011 and describes how his naivety took him on a steep learning curve. He then went on to spend time at Goldman Sachs on the finance and technology side and was an advisor to companies, CEO’s, CFO’s which gave him a good grounding to become an investor. 

In today’s episode we discuss the transformation of Australia’s energy system towards renewable sources, particularly solar power and the challenges faced for residential adoption such as high upfront costs and lack of awareness still existing. However, the increasing cost of electricity from traditional sources is creating a stronger incentive to make the switch. Albert also discusses Telstra’s approach to supporting companies that have potential to solve challenging problems at scale and how they go about supporting international expansion. 

Part 2: My Secret Sauce

In the second part of the show, Albert gives his top three pieces of advice for founders pitching for investment, and shares his go to book and podcast for learning about climate and climate tech. 

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