Not just an influencer, Srishti Shukla had earlier featured in a Telugu film titled ‘Natyam’. Moreover, Srishti Shukla is a qualified engineer in Computer Science. Besides her successful run as an influencer and an actress, she is working as a data analyst in one of the Fortune 500 companies. “The idea is to make a balance of work in professional life. That’s how you grow by learning different aspects of work in diversified fields”, concludes Shukla.
The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.
The COP26 in Glasgow last week averted disaster but also made clear the private sector’s crucial role in tackling climate change. Besides a few notable political wins to address methane leaks and rekindle frayed cooperation between economies, it was new commitments from the private sector that perhaps hold the most promise.
Back in 2006, Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” helped ignited $25 billion of venture investments in clean tech, mostly in the solar and ethanol sectors. Despite investors’ optimism, much of this capital burned out only a few years later, and as a result, many venture investors categorically avoided clean tech for the better part of a decade.
Thanks to our successes in the first clean tech wave, we are naturally optimistic about the role of VC in helping fund and scale game-changing clean tech solutions. Coming out of COP26 and as the world relies on the rapid adoption of clean tech to tackle climate change, it’s important that we understand VC’s further potential — but also its limitations.
At its best, the venture model enables young companies to take risks on early technology and pursue innovation in a way that large companies cannot. It might be counterintuitive, but venture-backed startups — beyond the magic created by their highly performing founders and organizations — also often outspend much larger and better-financed companies.
For a decade, Tesla, then an early-stage startup, easily outspent and outthought VW, Ford and the rest of the established car companies on engineering, designing and manufacturing electric vehicles (EVs). Similarly, startups Joby Aviation and Lilium are running circles around Boeing and Airbus on electric vertical takeoff (eVTOL) aircraft and QuantumScape is leading on next generation solid-state batteries.
