Liftoff with Keith Newman: For Founders looking for a new growth playbook and further inspiration. · Former Journalist, Startup + GTM exec Keith Newman

From Lyft to Climate Tech: Raj’s Journey of Innovation & Impact

·43 min·2 clips

Lyft started as a hackathon idea after Zimride struggled to get everyday traction.

1. Liftoff with Keith Newman covers Raj Kapoor’s shift from Lyft, FitMob, and Snapfish into climate tech through Climactic. 2. Raj Kapoor, a founder and venture investor, joins Keith Newman as the guest because he has worked as a founder, board member, chief strategy officer, and managing partner. 3. The episode asks how a tech operator applies startup judgment to climate, urbanization, and decarbonization. 4. Raj says a TED conference with John Doerr and Al Gore’s 'An Inconvenient Truth' made the climate crisis feel personal after Doerr brought his daughter on stage and cried. 5. He says that moment pushed him to create a social game that used a camera phone and a SimCity-like habitat of cute animals to show real-world impact. 6. Raj says Reid Hoffman connected him to a nonprofit, and he raised $500,000 from the EPA to build the game. 7. The game launched with help from Zynga product managers, but players engaged online without taking the climate actions the design required. 8. After that failure, Raj says he chose to invest in things that would 'make a difference' rather than keep building games. 9. At Mayfield, he and two colleagues looked at clean tech as capital-light climate investing instead of new silicon wafer manufacturing. 10. Raj says SolarCity solved solar financing, Sea Power used software for demand response, and Lyft started as Zimride before a hackathon created real-time peer-to-peer rides. 11. He says Lyft’s early cars wore pink mustaches, demand on launch was 10 times expected, and Uber first tried to shut the company down by calling it illegal. 12. Raj says Lyft later became a strategy and self-driving effort centered on 'self-driving, electric, shared vehicle' plans, and he helped hire hundreds of engineers in Palo Alto. 13. He says the pandemic forced Lyft to pull back its autonomous-car plans, which eventually led him to Emerson Collective and then Climactic. 14. Raj says climate investing now has to focus on enterprise emissions because enterprises drive '90 plus percent of all emissions' and supply chains make up 70 to 80 percent of that footprint. 15. He says efficiency and resilience are the two near-term opportunities, and he cites McKinsey’s estimate that efficiency alone could get 30 to 40 percent of the way to net zero. 16. Raj says resilience has a roughly four-to-one ROI now, with floods, hurricanes, brownouts, and wildfire risk making the case more urgent. 17. He says Climactic is betting on AI and robotics for physical-world problems, including a Carnegie Mellon team that used a field robot to 3X solar-farm construction. 18. Raj says the interview stays practical and reflective, with Keith Newman pushing on founding, pivoting, systems thinking, and how CEOs scale. 19. Founders, investors, and operators interested in climate, AI, or startup pivots. 20. Listeners wanting entertainment without strategy, venture, or climate detail.

As heard by us

A founder conversation about impact, adaptation, and keeping the mission intact.

Raj's shift from games into work with a clearer public purpose gives the episode a grounded founder-to-founder tone. His account of meeting the Lyft founders and hearing a plan built around self-driving, electric, shared vehicles keeps the focus on a concrete business direction…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Need a founder story about impact, Lyft, and climate change?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Liftoff with Keith Newman: For Founders looking for a new growth playbook and further inspiration.