Welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. I'm Paul Zelizer, your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs. Thank you so much. Today I'm thrilled to introduce our guests Philip Crim and Evan Karan and our topic today is Building Companies of Consequence within the Electron Economy. And let me tell you about Philip and Evan. Philip is the co founder and CEO of Montauk Climate. Previously he founded early stage investment firm Montauk Ventures.

He also co, founded, led and served as Chairman of Casper Sleep, you may have heard of it, scaling it up to over $500 million in revenue, taking it public on the New York Stock Exchange, and overseeing its eventual sale. Mr. Crim is the Director of the Travis Mannion foundation and on the Leadership Council of the Robin Hood Foundation. He holds a BBA in Marketing foundation from the Redcomb School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. And Evan is a CO founder and CIO of Montauk Climate with over 20 years in energy, electricity, risk and commodified management, and commodity management. He previously led venture at Riverstone Holdings, a 40 billion energy investment firm, and co founded Cleartrace, an ESG data platform for emissions tracking. Evan is also co founder of Daylight Energy, a community energy software network. He serves on the board of rpower, a distributed energy platform backed by I Squared, and previously served on MP2 Energy's board before its acquisition by Shell.

Early in his career, Evan held senior roles at Deutsche Bank, Mercuria and Trailstone. Evan and Philip, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thanks for having us Paul. We're excited to be here.

Let's talk a little bit about the origin story of Montauk Climate. I know a little bit because you all have been showing up in New Mexico. We're super grateful about that. But for somebody who's not familiar with Montauk, what is it and why did you start it?

Sure. Well, the story of how we got started actually predates the beginning of Montauk Climate to a company called Haven Energy. Haven Energy is a company that I helped co found and that's where I met Evan. Evan and I were connected through some mutual Texas buddies. I was born and raised in Texas. Evan spent a lot of time living there as well and they connected us because Haven Energy was focused on helping homeowners add battery storage to their houses. And they told me that Evan was interested in that area and could be very helpful and lo and behold, he was super helpful to the business. And I learned a lot from Evan and we started to talk more and more about other things that we could do in what we now call the electron economy.

But after working together on Haven Energy and getting that business to a great spot, Evan and I then ultimately co founded a business together called Electron X Electronics is a trading exchange for electricity derivatives. We're really excited about that business. Evan and I got together and put together a founding team there, raised some initial capital for the idea and built of the initial road map for the business. And after we worked together on that and ran that business together for a little bit, we said there's actually a bunch of ideas within this area that we think are interesting. And we both wanted to invest in and kind of go all into building a platform that really helped accelerate outcomes within company building for the electron economy. And that was when we started to focus on building Montauk Climate, which we started to do summer of 2023.

2023 launched. And what were some of your early hurdles? You had built some things before, but this was pretty unique, this focus on the electron economy. Like, what were some of the things that you had to overcome to get Montauk off the ground?