Clean Energy Spotlight: Nancy Pfund
Today’s spotlight was an early investor in Tesla, SpaceX, and a forestry company featured in the New York Times style section (yes, really). But first, do you know someone who deserves recognition for their contributions to clean energy? Nominate them in the comments.
Nancy Pfund is our latest feature for the Clean Energy Spotlight series. This former Sierra Club intern and longtime finance whiz is the founder and CEO of DBL Partners, a VC firm that supports cleantech and startup companies that can produce for investors and the planet. In other words, they focus on the “Double Bottom Line.” Hence D-B-L Partners.
She’s been called “arguably the most successful cleantech investor” by PV Magazine in 2017 and was an early apostle of “impact investing,” which was like ESG investing before ESG investing was cool.
In fact, across her career, Nancy has advanced what’s possible in energy and innovation. In finance, she worked for “one of the early VC banks for tech in San Francisco” and started JPMorgan’s social impact fund. In energy, she was a founding member of the California Clean Energy Fund and an advisory board member of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its incubator Cyclotron Road.
But that’s not all. She’s also advancing what’s possible through mentoring, to address the alarming gender gap in the higher ranks of finance. “I think mentoring can play a key role in building gender equality in the workplace,” she said in 2018. “I have mentored a few women and hope that they are bigger and bolder as a result.”
Nancy’s career has made an impact indeed. According to the New York Times, she’s “built a reputation as the go-to venture capitalist for companies looking to make a social impact.” She’s been honored as the 2022 Financial Woman of the Year Award by Financial Women of San Francisco, as one of FORTUNE’s World’s Top 25 Eco-Innovators, and as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business.
“I would like to be remembered as an investment professional that helped the world recognize that all investing is impact investing, and that rather than closing our eyes to the social and environmental ramifications of our investment portfolio, we should embrace those ramifications and seek to optimize them as a matter of course,” she said in 2018.
Thank you, Nancy, for your leadership in cleantech finance and impact investing and for expanding what’s possible for innovators, for women, and for clean energy.
