2:16 - To stay in business for a long time, you need to be resilient and grind it out. There’s no easy button for making your business successful. You need to look for continuous improvement within the organization — how can you make it 1% better, 1% more accurate, 1% more efficient, save 1% of the budget? And that continuous improvement is challenging, so you need to be okay with accepting accountability if you get some negative feedback.
19:10 - People in the renewable industry tend to have several roles in several companies. People in the oil, gas and chemical companies tend to stay at one company for a very long time. The benefit is that they bring a broad range of experience and knowledge to project, but it’s hard for them to see what’s possible in the future, rather than what needs to be done today. The renewable industry tends to have a broader mindset.
28:00 - Success in a business depends on how leadership executes their strategies. Tactics is doing things right. Strategy is doing the right things. You must have strategic marketing, strong sales and business development executed by people who care, not just have an engine that's generating leads. Don’t pursue opportunities that are a bad fit, with no strategy behind them.

11:31 - The clean economy sector is where everything is headed. It’s a conversation at the dinner table not because it’s famous, but because it's infamous. There are extreme weather events that impact our lives so deeply, to the point where it’s not a clean economy anymore. It’s just the economy. So, once someone starts working in this sector, it’s hard to move elsewhere since this is a good spot to be.
18:39 - To be a great CEO means to inspire the right talent, bring them into your workplace and be a leader they can look up to. Doing all the little things won’t get you anywhere, so it’s important to stand up and demonstrate good leadership.
29:53 - If you want your performance as a CEO to stay high most days, it’s important to take care of yourself. Spend time with your family and focus on physical and mental well-being. Release any stress outside of work so you can start each day on a good note.

5:22 – It’s tempting to rush through team building in the fast paced, hectic environment of a startup. But doing so puts your team and company at a disadvantage. Take the time to understand the capabilities and aspirations of employees before settling into a rapid, task-completion mindset.

14:56 - Once the company has reached profitability, the CEO’s focus shifts more to goal setting and talent retention.

18:14 - Match the ambition of your company with the addressable market you're seeking. If the addressable market is huge, keep your ambitions huge as well. If you don't set the ambition, the capital will not follow.

24:23 - CEOs 'inheriting' a new team, rather than creating one, as a startup, have a particular challenge in gaining the trust of their new employees. One unconventional way to build a strong team is job shadowing, literally. Spend a day watching your employees in action to understand the full scope of their responsibilities and observe the ways your leadership could make their jobs easier.

14:55 – To stay current on the talent pool, a leader needs to be regularly talking to potential candidates. Communicate with your team regularly about market conditions, spend time with your customers, and attend industry events. Don’t be afraid to lean on recruiters to get a detailed understanding of the talent market that comes from speaking with candidates daily.

16:50 - The ‘cool’ factor isn’t enough to draw in cleantech talent anymore. Top talent most values a healthy work culture, the flexibility to follow their passion at work and be able to affect huge issues like climate change, and strong company missions that align with their values.

18:50 - To be a successful recruiter, communicate with your candidates as you would a customer - transparency and clarity about the interview process makes candidates feel prioritized. Each person at your company who talks to a candidate should have a different goal for the conversation to ultimately make a hire based on data, not just gut feelings.

6:39 - The 1-10-100 rule is when you identify an issue early, it costs you a point. If you let it sit and you ignore it for a little while, it costs you 10 points…

10:06 - Leading a clean economy company is very different because it is very policy dependent, both for the good and for the bad…I think that's fundamentally different than moving widgets around the world.

20.02 - So as a company, we believe it is very important to do behavioral interviews that eliminate or at least weed out biases so that we can…develop a new cohort of values-based learners who come from different environments.

22.35 - Our mission is to do good things, do them with great people, and do them in a way that we can be proud of. So, I'm a climate optimist.

6:40 – The three most pertinent questions to ask yourself when facing a promotion or job change.

17:45 – Complex problem solving at the CEO level.

18:51 – Learn whether you are an entrepreneur or INTRApreneur.

31:31 – Miranda's strategy on how to establish broader perspective on a job candidate.

42:12 – Building a strong culture for your company is imperative, not a nice-to-have.

7:33 – Rather than always trying to insulate your company from failure, build a team that will excel and bounce back when things go wrong (it’s inevitable!)

10:27 – Jennifer's advice for recent grads and early career professionals: to find fulfillment in your job, you should be dedicated to exploration throughout your whole career.

16:15 – There is a huge opportunity for farmers to make additional streams of income from leasing their land to solar and wind farms.

26:10 – Her go-to hiring question: “What do you get excited about?”

15:11 – What were the lessons that you learned in the rainforest, were they applicable to running a company? And if so, what were they and how did they apply?

17:07 – Looking back, who were your most important mentors and what did you learn from them?

24:33 – When you compare notes with those people, with what your experience has been like, where you've been the CEO from the start of one company for almost two decades, what have you observed of your experience differing from their experiences?

27:22 – What is the difference in being a CEO of a venture back company versus a PE company, PE back company to one that is now stood up on its own and is, is maturing? How would you just table those differences?

3:48 – How Nelson Mandela taught Claus to level set his experience of frustrating situations and irritating people.
9:16 – Running a company in a more mature space is about realizing potential and maintaining the potential that’s already been achieved.
12:29 – New companies don’t have brand, so the clean economy CEO is the catalyst for the brand’s buildout.
15:17 – Why Claus hired an in-house coach and made the coach available to all of his employees.
17:37 – How opera serves the same purpose for Claus’s CEO performance as ice baths serve athletes.