The party that’s making Climate cool 🥳
It’s not a political party
👋Welcome to Anticlimatic - an experience where you say ‘Bye!’ to jargons & doom and ‘Hi!’ to analogies & memes to understand climate change better.
Explain like I’m a memer
(summary in a meme)
In a few previous editions of Anticlimatic, you came across the reference to a certain The Climate Party. You may have wondered what it was or may have simply skipped it. But today, you ought to know for your girl is the founder of this raging party. 😎
Earlier this year, when I was attempting to embed my professional self in the Climate space1 with no prior experience, finding relevant people who could help me navigate my way was hard. It was quite unlike my previous experience in consumer-tech where one would inevitably bump into category managers frantically negotiating deals even in public washrooms. Given my proximity to India’s capital city and residence in one of India’s startup hotspots, I refused to accept that there weren’t enough relevant people around me. I was sure this was a discovery issue and not just a supply issue. I decided to dig for these people by simply posting on LinkedIn about a Climate meetup I would host at a community park in Gurgaon. At this point, my LinkedIn network just had traces of people working on climate solutions - just as many hazelnuts that go in a hazelnut spread. 70 signed up, 22 turned up. On a Sunday afternoon. At a place where they were offered no food or drinks. That’s where The Climate Party was born.
What is The Climate Party?
The Climate Party is a platform which brings together ALL Climate stakeholders, regularly, to cross-pollinate ideas for building climate solutions. Think of it as India's LinkedIn for Climate but in the physical world. From a 20ish member meetup in February 2023, The Climate Party is emerging as a celebrated force with ~400 people having been a part of 8 editions of climate parties across 3 cities (Gurgaon, Delhi & Mumbai).
At the core, The Climate Party is building a scenius for climate solutions. Scenius is the collective genius / combined intelligence of a scene. Given the complexity and multi-order effects of climate change, it is imperative to design holistic solutions which cannot happen without taking into account the multi-perspectives of different stakeholders. With every climate party, a multitude of these stakeholders immerse themselves in this scenius, discover their complements, build on one another’s ideas and get inspired to do better. Visualize the mathematical product of {founders x think-tanks x funders x scientists x activists x policymakers x journalists x educators x students x aspiring change makers}. That's what The Climate Party is. To strengthen this scenius, we’re building a tight community in parallel such that every community member can depend on the other for achieving a common goal.
In this short span of time, we’ve witnessed some tangible outcomes at our climate parties - founders have raised funds, businesses have onboarded senior advisors, ventures have won customers, B2B partnerships have been forged and young change makers have landed jobs!
How do we do what we do?
By sticking to simplicity and breaking away from traditions.
Walking the talk, each climate party is a zero frills, waste-free gathering where, unlike most events, no food or drinks are served. All attendees are asked to bring their own, if they require. Even the name tags that we use are reusable. Since Day 1, this simple but tough-to-gulp hack has ensured high quality and high passion in the scenius. Unless you’re serious about Climate, you won’t spend a weekend every month among unpredictable strangers, at a place which doesn’t even serve food and drinks as a saving grace. As a second layer of quality control, participants are also made to answer a bunch of questions at signup to understand their motivation to join the party.
As someone who naturally tends to look away from the mainstream, I am building The Climate Party to be a powerhouse of novelty in how people engage on the most pressing issues. Right from addressing this scenius as a ’party’ and engaging people in constructive discussions in informal, experimental settings (truly living up to the moniker) to building perspectives through climate-games, The Climate Party aims to inbuild fun in the solution building process. Think of us as also the Liquid Death2 of Climate. They make water sexy, we make Climate cool. The mainstream image of climate change is dreary enough, we could do with less of it.
When LinkedIn met Liquid Death in the physical world, The Climate Party emerged.
Why does India need The Climate Party?
Nothing like The Climate Party exists right now.
All stakeholders in one room
Without The Climate Party, the diversity of climate stakeholders NEVER comes together on a regular basis. At every climate party, participants have echoed the same thought - “nothing like this exists and we need more of this”. I met a seasoned climate policy professional who had never had a chance to get the scientist and investor perspectives and when he did, he felt like he was living under a rock. He admitted to having had lost opportunities where the new found insights could have added value to his own work. This is just one of the many examples that keep coming my way.
Inclusivity
All the big ticket conclaves, forums and VC events are exclusive spaces, not inclusive. In order to build a scenius, we need to create high quality spaces that are accessible not only to current stakeholders but also to aspiring changemakers who want to make their contribution. The new age climate founders are increasingly coming from different fields with no prior experience in building climate solutions. I am one of them. Similarly, many youngsters with no prior climate education are now looking to build careers in Climate-tech. I meet many of them at our climate parties. Many don’t know where to begin but then The Climate Party comes to their rescue by providing access to the most relevant folks that exist out there.
Offline
Climate change is an aggregation of local problems, each of which need contextual solutions. While online communities like Terra.do and Work on Climate are great to connect people across borders and for transactional exchanges, they don’t enable localization of minds required to build contextual climate solutions like offline spaces do. The Climate Party is the offline fix. Even generally, today, online is the norm and offline, a privilege. With everything digitising, digital experience will be a commodity while being able to experience something in the real world will bear high value. And nothing trumps human connections made in the physical world. We’re seeing these outcomes play out in consumer tech already. Everything that began as online only is witnessing an increasing offline presence - D2C brands and e-commerce platforms are all setting up physical stores as online sales plateau. It’s like coming full circle to the OG habits with an added option of online channels.
I see the above as our unfair advantages.
Validation for The Climate Party
Our growing community members are both our fanbase and our greatest cheerleaders.
The no frills / walking the talk setting that we operate in has turned out to be our USP. In one of the climate parties, a participant said “We got a lot more done over water than we ever do over drinks”. A massive diversity of top talent, from seasoned professionals to school students, repose their trust in The Climate Party. Many of them repeatedly travel inter-state to make it every month! We definitely have a fast growing group of loyalists.
With each climate party, as participants have found value and a novel/fun outlet for getting things done, massive network effects have kicked in with attendees urging their colleagues and larger network to taste our climate parties. People now find out about us through channels I have no remote connection with. Last week we launched in Mumbai and it took just 5 days from announcement to receive such an overwhelming response that we had to close registrations (which was followed by multiple requests for creating exceptions). As a consequence of the word of mouth appreciation + our coolness quotient, we keep getting flooded with requests to launch sooner in other Indian cities. A good problem to solve.
Our manic pace of building credibility in the space has led many establishments to take notice such that they want to partner with The Climate Party in whatever way possible. Our marquee partners till date include Matrix Partners (venture capital), Dalberg (impact consulting), Masters’ Union School of Business (business school for entrepreneurs), CEEW (policy think tank) and Swedish researchers who’ve developed a climate card game, Climate Call.
What does our future look like?
As an ardent fan of the power of intersections, the plan is to continue stealing learnings from a variety of fields and whip them up in counter-intuitive ways to blow away TCP users with delight.
The current version of The Climate Party has been a journey in establishing whether something like The Climate Party is even needed (or Product Market Fit). We’ve worked on discovering unserved needs and figuring solutions which our potential customers don’t know (yet) they need. Since I deeply believe in the power of offline, I started with the hard part - getting people out of their homes on weekends in no-frills but high energy settings. With the validation achieved in 3 cities over 8 months, I’m confident that we’re on the right path.
v2.0 of The Climate Party will focus on the following:
Scaling The Climate Party across Tier 1 Indian cities;
Building for the norm, i.e. an online platform to enable incremental value creation for The Climate Party community. This platform will serve multiple niches which will eventually feed highly structured offline interactions. More on this as we bring things to life;
Monetizing the platform to develop a self-sustaining business ; and
Raising funds to power all of the above and build a kickass team.
Until now, The Climate Party has been a one woman show by yours truly but we’re fast becoming bigger than I can manage alone. If you’re someone who’s bought into our mission or know someone who might be the right mission fit, do get in touch here. The Climate Party needs more enablers.
To stay in touch with our growth story, follow TCP here.
Beautiful! Can't wait to attend one when I'm in India :)
Wow, this is definitely a movement now and amazing to see how far you have come in this journey. Great going and all the best. 👏👏