It’s a day that legendary entrepreneur and tech investor John Doerr remembers well. His then 15year-old daughter explained that she was concerned about the many perilous impacts of climate change, and felt that his generation was responsible for exacerbating the problem. Baby Boomers, she told him, had a moral obligation to develop climate solutions designed to foster a greener future.

The Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist took the challenge to heart and made it his mission—travelling the world from the Amazon rainforest to the Mojave Desert and beyond—to find and fund viable climate-related ventures. Along the way he applied lessons learned over decades in business: that he needed to be ruthlessly, intellectually honest about identifying key risks in a venture early and removing them; and that in the climate sector, costs are king and performance matters more than anything else.

Doerr went on to write the seminal book Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now. It calls on global governments to reduce carbon pollution by 59 megatons by 2050 and offers a step-by-step guide to achieving that ambitious goal.

In this wide-ranging conversation, The Sustainability Leader founder Richard Blundell sits down with Doerr to discuss his illustrious career, his take on the climate crisis and what it will take to get business, governments and civil society on-side to save the planet.