Lior is an investor, entrepreneur, and the Founder and Managing Partner of Eclipse Ventures, a Palo Alto-based venture firm that recently raised $1.2 billion across two new funds. Eclipse is a team of operators and investors building companies that are disrupting old-line industries. Lior Susan began his journey on a kibbutz and served in the Israeli Special Forces. In 2008, he co-developed Intucell, a software-defined networking solution, leading to its acquisition by Cisco in four years. Prior to launching Eclipse, Lior was Founder and General Partner at LabIX, the hardware investment platform of Flextronics. At LabIX, Lior led investments in companies across: energy storage, wireless/infrastructure, 3-D optics, additive manufacturing, and robotics. Lior founded Eclipse Ventures in 2014 to meet the unique and unmet needs of entrepreneurs building full-stack start-ups. He is particularly excited to work with founders who want to bring the full-stack approach to legacy industries and build digital bridges to the physical world.
"Move Fast And Break Things" Doesn't Work In The Hardware Industry
Jay Kapoor: Hey folks, welcome back to their episode of climb by VSC. I'm your host Jake Kapoor. Today I am thrilled to have on our show Lior Susan, who is an investor, entrepreneur, now the Founder and Managing Partner of Eclipse ventures, which is a Palo Alto based VC fund that has raised most recently $1.2 billion across the two recent funds. What I love about Eclipse is it overlaps with a lot of things that I love investing in. They're a team of operators and investors that are backing companies that are disrupting legacy industries, the more we can dive into what some of that means. And you started this fund, I guess, almost eight, nine years ago, to meet the unique needs of these entrepreneurs. So, I'm excited to talk about that journey and everything you've learned along the way. Right now, I'll just start by saying thank you so much for joining me on Climb.
Lior Susan: Thank you, Jay. Pleasure being here. And when you say eight years, oh my god, it's been eight years.
JK: I know exactly. Well, I hinted at some of your kind of rich and varied career paths. So maybe let's start there. You were investing as an angel you were investing with some funds. Talk to us about the thesis of Eclipse ventures and maybe a little bit about the stage and focus and that kind of stuff before we dive into the history.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I started Eclipse in 2015 with a single mission that I felt operating as an operator in physical industries that naturally carrying most of the world GDP. So more than 80% of $100 trillion is in online industries, physical industries, same terminology, everything from manufacturing, industrial energy, agriculture, supply, chain, defense, etc. And I just saw on the field, that there is lack of investment, and lack of investors that understand how to build those companies. And I felt we're going to see a lot of Tesla's and SpaceX and I wants to be on that side.
JK: Yeah, and in terms of where you guys typically come in, stage and check size and working with your companies, help us understand that.
LS: Yeah, so we're managing about $4.3 billion and 25 people at the same as you highlighted Jay. We are all operators that came from companies like Tesla and SpaceX and Amazon and Apple and others. And we’re usually coming from what we call potential equity. This means we will work with the founder to build a company so that's the earlier that we will go. We also have a gold fund that can come later stage and lead rounds in Series C and beyond. I will say we operate as one team, but we are the two pools of capital that allow us to build in the early stage and compound into a later stage.
JK: Yeah, so as our listeners can probably pick up from your accent your background is Israeli. You grew up on a kibbutz and you served in the IDF. And so, talk to me about kind of that background going back to those days. Are there a couple of lessons that you take from those formative experience that have now defined how you're investing in companies today.
LS: Yeah, I said that. It's not the typical person that you will find during investments. Now I didn't go to business school. I was not a principal and another so I grew up in a kibbutz and I spent there almost eight years of the Special Forces as a soldier I would say, probably two learnings that I had in both cases that I think is very relevant to doing companies and building early-stage companies and then grow those businesses and on the investing side. I would say from the kibbutz point of view. It's freedom.
People don't lock the door you don't know that this is community you don’t lock the door. It's Oh, yeah. And kids like me will go and walk while going to school. So, you one day a week you going to walk rather than go to school, in my case, in the age of 16. I decided that it's enough school for me and I went to work only for two years. But there is a lot of independencies and a lot of freedom that I think is it's training the muscle of this idea of taking big risks and trust your instincts and your judgment.
That I think it's very relevant in the worlds of startups and doing things around technology. For me so that was the key because I didn't the military leadership naturally, so I led the team at Special Forces and variety of stages variety of tasks and there is nothing better than leadership, then managing 11-12 People that needs to operate very far away from home with a lot of risks. So, I think taking risks and leadership are very, very relevant to our business.
JK: Yeah we've, in our fund, backed a few entrepreneurs out of Tel Aviv and in Haifa. And, you know, one of the interesting things I've noticed is, again, because of the military service, there's a lot of folks that come from there, but a lot of co-founders are made there and it to me, it seems like you know, folks find people with naturally aligned inclinations when they're spending all those times together.
LS: You know, it's there's nothing worse than building a bond by doing that together.
JK: Exactly. So, I also talked about the fact that you know, you are operators and your background, you had the journey of building into sell, which you later sold to Cisco before you started Eclipse ventures. You know, I love speaking to investors who were operators, I think there's a natural empathy that also the founders really kind of look to, was there something that was unconventional that ended up working for you in your journey as an operator that you now apply when you're meeting or advising founders as an investor?
LS: Yeah, you know, it's I think it goes back a little bit to the roots and you know, the notion of leadership and take taking risks. When we did the interview. So, I did it with my young brother talking about naturally having a bond with your co-founder. Yes, that's a blood bond. And we do to meet at&t That was done at the bank, our largest customer but before they were a customer, and we brought with us Purcellville. And we show up to the meeting with a servo and as you will expect, do you have those two Israelis broken English terrible accents showing up to a meeting with a salvo? Yeah, the guy had this shit face of like, what is this thing?
JK: How did you bring it over? Was it in a suitcase?
LS: No, we didn't fit it in the suitcase. We brought it in a cardboard box. And we drag it out things on this little trolley. And he's like, what, what is this thing? We told them. Oh, he brought the service so we can do the deployments for the POC. He was like, this is the first meeting I have with you people. You didn't even start the diligence. We didn't even do legal we barely sign an NDA. What do you mean during the POC?
And we told them listen, all our savings are in this service. And we convinced them to meet with us we extend the trip to a one full week. And then the end of that week that server was being deployed inside in a lab showing what we're doing from software defined network. That server became a $50 billion deal. Over five years with ATM theater essentially was the reason that discovered the company. Yeah, so I love that story. Yeah, it's just hustle and taking risks were worthwhile and this business.
JK: Yeah, I love that story. Because I think, you know, a lot of seed investors say the cliche that you back the founder, right? You want to fall in love with the company and the idea but ultimately, you back the founder. And it's always hard to know this founder have risk you know, resilience and grit and creativity and his stories like that to me that go Yeah, I don't think anybody would have doubted your grit and resilience. If you're going to bring a server and push your meeting out or to try to close a deal.
LS: It's a fine line of being batshit crazy and have courage. And grit is a fine line.
JK: So, talking a little bit about the thesis of Eclipse and kind of the companies that you're looking at. I heard you say this amazing thing you said we are at the end of an era of globalization. And you just came back from DC as we were chatting before we got on the call. And the idea that the that firms that are investing with a global viewpoint are naturally going to struggle in the next decade. So, I'll elaborate on that for me. What do you mean by this end of globalization?
LS: Yeah, we after we did into cell moved to work for a guy named Mike McNamara and he was a CEO of a company called Flextronics. So, flex and they are like the American version of Foxconn. So very large, industrial manufacturing and I was focusing on the digital transformation of build the digital transformation team. And we flex operating these 12 segments that describing physical industries, automotive, aerospace and defense, energy, mining and construction etc. And we will walk with the largest companies in the world, and you saw those industries essentially kind of post-World War Two has been a very big dependency on globalization.
What allowed the GDP to grow from, I don't know 50 trillion to $100 trillion in a matter of 30 years was because we went global. We try our manufacturing in a low cost we find customers elsewhere, and we became this very global community that people are operate these very large industries with a lot of dependency on other countries because labor cost or because they're scared or because they're there they're like big customers us usually was the customer that deal of globalization is good only for certain of country and named as Europe will be a China that actually just find a very large customers called United States that bringing a lot of GDP growth to their country in manufacturing, and they were able to build the fastest growing economy in human history by this single deal.
Now, that deal works well long term with both sides winning and I think us won as well because our economy was growing and we were enjoying as a consumer be able to buy things cheaper, that is just not working in the last 10 years. And as a result, you are seeing countries deciding that those physical industries are national security assets. And as a result, I came from DC last night, they are going to put in the case of Nixon administration $1.2 trillion into the chips act semiconductor DLP or LPL to the Department of Energy Manufacturing or onshoring. They basically going to put a lot of capital to build a domestic infrastructure, that moving from globalization to essentially the globalization.
JK: So, talking about the idea that this is a national defense challenge and issue. You know, what becomes interesting to me is that for so long VCs have avoided interacting with anything government. And I think in both categories that we as a front cover, and I know that you cover industrial automation, climate adaptation, it seems like we are kind of on a collision course with all thing’s government, whether it's at the local level in terms of how you're deploying or it's at the national level in terms of where some of these tax incentives are coming from. How do you advise your companies in managing venture scale growth while still having to bump up against the challenges that is, you know, the pace at which government operates?
LS: It's tough, there is no shortcuts. It's tough to deal with the government. I will say that I'm extremely bullish on the current administration and the type of the talent that they brought to the administration that are very forward-thinking people and that's the reason I tell you the truth. Why spend the time though, because I think the other sides really wanted and they tell me all the time and you will tell us what we need to change to move faster.
So, and of course, naturally allocate 1.2 trillion and build a true strategy. infrastructure bill was the first-time post world will do that someone stopped for a second and say, okay, well, we should invest to add a new economy around the industrial digital infrastructure. But there is no shortcuts and it's there. It's not a recurrent revenue and there is no CAC to LTV and there is not ARR is different. But on the flip side, these people can give you 50 $100 billion contracts, and for a startup, to be able to put his hands on the size of the contract. I personally prefer that than dealing with churn and selling a 20k piece of software to manage a job, my personal taste.
JK: Yeah, startups that have other startups as their customers. It's like a house of cards, right? Risk on risk, they call it. And one of the cool things that Eclipse has done that you mentioned at the top of our conversation is that you're incubating ideas in addition to early stage investing and then obviously supporting on growth. I'm always curious about when a fund like yours, will choose to build an idea in house versus, you know, it feels like there's a founder out there trying to pursue every aspect of this industrial automation or, or adaptation problem. What are the things that you look for before you decide to let's say build versus buy?
LS: Yeah, it's for us it starts in the same way. We will build an investment thesis and we will go and say hey, we are a huge believer in long duration energy storage because we believe the grid will move much more to battery based to build micro grids and that's your great let's go and find a company that doing long duration energy storage. In our case, we were looking for someone that using serum ion because we personally believe that that will be the right architecture from a chemistry point of view. And we mapped the market, and we just didn't find a company that we liked in us that had the right team right strategy right audit, and this is usually when we will go okay, let's just go build it. And we will bring someone that we call him down an eventual founder that have a unique skill set for that company.
In that case, it's someone that was a Tesla northvolt and did a lot of energy storage, and he will live with us as an employee of the firm for six to 12 months working on that idea. Till it's mature enough for a company and then we'll seed fund the company. But the idea is originally we started building companies mainly because we are founders and operators, and we didn't want to stop that motion we just love building companies. And I think it's turned to be something that has much more strategic aspects of what we do. We still know that we are going to build three to four companies a year. So, it's not most of our business, but it's definitely a very important part of our business at Eclipse and it's also kind of keeping us very sharp, on you know, founding businesses and kind of being essentially in the shoes of where we usually will invest in people.
JK: I think even more excited to have this kind of conversation with you more so than some of the folks that aren't building companies themselves. Because one of the things that our listeners love to hear is pitfalls to avoid, right what issues could they be facing down the line that maybe they're not considering today? When building in this world of physical industries of legacy industries old line and you know, whatever the terminology we all decide on one day, right? We know there's inherent resistance to change. We know there's inherent business model differences. What are some of the pitfalls that you see founders encounter most? And how do you advise you’re in navigating this?
LS: Yeah, most fast and break things don't work in our industry. Because if I deploy an automation inside Pepsi warehouse and it's not working, I will never sell it automation again. So, we are telling people make sure that when you're deploying something, the customer is ready, and the reality is never ready. You know, you're always going to get it the better, but it needs to meet the SLA it needs to meet whatever you promised to the customers. You cannot bullshit the customers in this type of sectors because you operate and selling to Fortune 50 largest energy companies in the world largest manufacturing in the world largest defense companies in the world.
So, the government, the room for error is zero. By the way, I cannot send a new software scrap to my production and because I'm not only dealing only with bits, I'm dealing also with atoms. So, any change is very different than the pure bits. So just going with that mindset. I think it's very important. Now on the flip side, you're creating a mode, and for the second person to replace you will be much harder for him as well. So that's why you don't see in our sectors 20 companies working on the same exact problem is because it's hard. And if you're able to do it, you will build Tesla or SpaceX, so Amazon or Apple or now in video, it's hard to build those companies, but it's very profitable because those markets are huge.
JK: So that goes against the conventional wisdom that I'm hearing from founders who say, oh, my customers want a drop in solution. They want something that you know is easily replacing a human on the conveyor belt or whatever it is. But your perspective is not that, it’s that you need to co-develop essentially with these customers at every stage. You need to find the strategic customers or what we call design partners.
LS: Yeah, you find the champion there that will give you almost a real time feedback on what you build. I think just to dropping something, you will solve point solutions that I think the outcome of whatever you solve for me will never be that big. I'm trying to transform an industry to do end to end stuff. To do a big stuff. And to do it, you must have in your real time feedback from the market.
JK: See I love contrarian takes on the show. So, I'm glad we already we already got one out there. Yeah, maybe we'll get another one on this. So, we're speaking at the end of q3 by all accounts, multi quarter over quarter declines in series a funding Series B funding, you know, might as well be frozen, not for everybody. But has that freeze affected the way that you're thinking about capitalizing both existing companies and then also new ones that you're meeting.
LS: This year we deployed more capital than we have ever deployed in the history of a single year. So, we like great, awesome that I'm a I'm a fundamental conviction and conviction investor. I don’t care what the graphs are saying I care about the type of assets that I'm seeing and the cost of my capital and is the size of the opportunity and we are doing the late-stage deals, and we do early stage, and we build, and we fall on. We have all that this year. We also didn't really because our model that we only lead and the largest shareholder and being super close to working with companies daily.
We never let the companies I mean, never it's a big word we did. Did that made that mistake many times, but in general, we don't let them run away and just basically start burning capital. Like madness without what we call CVD core value drivers that we will be measured with them to make sure that we are hitting inflection point. Now, if you hit inflection point, in that big of a market, that hunting transformation, you will raise capital regardless on the environment.
JK: Yeah. And you have benchmarks, when you say look, to get to that core value driver, I want you to have 12 months or 18 months of runway, I mean, is there a general guideline that you have for your companies in that regard?
LS: Less about the runway, more about the core value drivers show me that you can do usually we have between four to five core value drivers in each company, and we will measure it every month. You did a concern tracking over performing complete not tracking. This is the option for each of the partners we'll fill in our system. One day I'll show you that. And if you hit the core value drivers, I don't care if you have six months of runway or 35 months. Yeah, you might be a zombie that has a lot of runways but you’re not changing anything in the world. It's bad use of my time. I prefer to put on some of the top six months but he's smashing the core value drivers.
JK: So I'm noticing some common traits here, right, which is when you're building in these industries, things will take longer, you must manage your burn or do creative things to be able to get there. How do you identify these traits of scrappiness, resourcefulness, grit resilience when you meet these founders, what are what are you know, core value drivers that you look for in these people to know that they're going to be able to execute on the core value drivers in the business?
LS: That's a great conversation that this is like one of the hottest topics inside the Eclipse for many years. Yeah, how we can constantly refine was what is the CGD for the people that were investing in not only the companies you know I can tell you that is like be able to disagree with you. Huge core values for us cannot be only yes man but to be good listeners. Combination of having strong opinion but open to listening. Has people just had a continuing view that something that the rest of the market is doing in one thing, and they want to do it in a very different thing.
People that can think that big. I will say one thing that we added in the last couple of years people that good selling. We learn that a lot of those companies will fail because they know how to sell or don't and selling meaning not only to our customers, also to investors and to employees and to partners. So, we are constantly refining the CVD around the people but yeah, it's the toughest one to get right. It's interesting our typecast for founders will be different than our friends from the SAS and fintech. It's us Yeah, usually people in the late 30s, early 40s. He never went through YC or anything like that do not drop off from school.
What we did recently, I think northvolt was one of them. Autodesk and they are being a very successful operators, but they're first-time founders. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because like, usually when we talk about first time founders, we have this idea of a kid with a hoodie and he's 23 years old, right? They are its people with families. Yes, that gives up the job to follow their dream and build something. So, they are coming with much more tools as an operator's that we really like.
JK: Yeah. And they have the experience of maybe managing an org which you know, some guy in a hoodie must learn that for the first time.
LS: Correct, by the way, then on the flip side, they are not going to work 20 hours a day. In the office and weekends, because they are families like this interesting balance.
JK: Yeah. Is there something you see in your portfolio that repeat founders do differently? And by that, I mean better than the first-time founders and what could the first-time founders learn from those experiences?
LS: So we have now multiple companies, that is people that build with US companies exit and are doing another company.
JK: That's high praise. By the way, the fact that they came back to you means that they like you.
LS: I know that’s crazy. And I think it's too early in the journey and the second one so I can really point on the diesel. They're doing different it's just it's not a very scientific answer, but they just know the shit. I don't know how to better describe it. You just, they just did down not getting worried about almost anything. Yeah, no, exactly. They've been there. They ran out of money, they raise money, they fire people, people less than the last the customer. They have the muscle memory. That is very, very, very important in this business. It's not the only way to do it, but it's I’m curious over time to measure the performance of our second time founders was the first time.
JK: I always ask that question. And you'd be surprised how often I get an answer like yours, which is, I don't exactly know how to quantify it, but they just know the decision to make and it's there's no real way to shortcut that if you've never been in that situation before. You just know the decision. You must make because you've seen it before.
LS: It's muscle memory. It's why he's taken all Pareto in the military Special Forces, and you make them officers you don't they never go straight to be an officer's because you want them to have the muscle memory as an operator's first.
JK: Yeah. So, we do a segment on the show that we call hype or hopeful. Basically, I share a trend or theme or tale when that's happening, and I'd love to get your perspective on whether it's hype or hopeful. You know, think about like a rapid fire round. If there's more to unpack than then we'll unpack it.
LS: Sounds good.
JK: Okay, the first one is, you know, as we're seeing the steady trend of automation in blue collar jobs and legacy industries, with higher promises of efficiency and better cost savings. We're also seeing this fear of widespread job losses. Do you think that this adoption of automation across these industries is going to be an overall hopeful shift or hype that VCs like us are pumping up because you know, we believe in it.
LS: I'm a huge job salon that has an agile I'm drinking my own kool aid, but I think you know, you just you don't need to guess you can go to the books of history and see what the print press did to the printing industries and how many more jobs has been created. It's happened so many times in the history that are providing a new type of an efficiency or productivity tools, or technology will have a massive gain of creating a new job.
JK: You know, it's interesting, from our perspective on the PR side, it's so funny to me when I see, you know, job shortages in the same industry that has fears about robots taking jobs. It seems you can't have shortages and fears of robotics, but ultimately, that is part of the reason that we do what we do, which is helping tell that story in a way that makes people not so afraid. Talking about this transition to automation, you know, I'm trying to think of the right way to think about this. Business models is one of the challenges that we see from companies’ robotics as a service as a new business model that we've seen proposed. Seems like a great idea, oh, I'm building recurring revenue as opposed to you know, doing procurement-based financing. But then you realize that you're adding a new operational complexity on top of already the thing that you're selling. Have you seen robotics as a service work in your portfolio or is it hype or hopeful?
LS: So up until recently, there was a was a hype. I mean, the first time we had a company that doing that in a very successful way in the retail space, that starts turning me to be unhelpful, and I think what the main thing that gets me hopeful is the customers that now putting the spend in Dell optics budget rather than in the capex budget and understand that this is where he should sit that I just didn't see it happening before.
JK: But what does this company do? I mean, tell us a little bit more about this company.
LS: It’s a company called CMB robotics. They basically do have those robots that during nighttime will go inside the retail store grocery in the 28 cameras, they basically scan the whole store building a 3d map and an inventory map of what's happening in the store, and they give the real time results of that and analytics to the store. So, the stores know, what was the shrinkage? Were they missing product? Well, they have the pricing on the product. And it's just there is a very strong ROI to the customers in a matter of three months and they don't sell it they just charge $2,500 per month to the subscription.
JK: That's fascinating. So, for our listeners, I don't know what my last one that back to a company called Data assembly, which was doing this from a software perspective. And it blew my mind that large grocery chains you know, if you're listening probably your local grocery chain, most of them pay consultants to walk down these aisles direct with an iPad or a clipboard, It's crazy to me that that's how we are managing this in 2023. And the reason it's so important again, is you know, a 50-cent mispricing because of the volume they're selling turns into you know, 50k loss potentially, at the end of the month. So, I love that by the way, I know maybe more about this industry than I should that's a unique solution to go after that problem. Yeah. So, we'll do one last hype or hopeful we were chatting about Washington and politics. I'm going to stay away from the red blue of it all. But, you know, we've seen bills like the IRA chips act infrastructure bill, promising substantial funds to foster clean energy transition in these legacy industries. It's also a political football a little bit. Right. So, are you hopeful that these initiatives are going to ultimately mean more opportunity for startups? Is that hype or hopeful?
LS: I say it's hopeful. I do not know. I will say historically, I was hype.
JK: Yeah. And why is that? Is it just the ocean?
LS: It's a combination of three things, the quality of the talent that they were able to bring people from the industry is the strategy they stopped for a second to understand what is the strategy of this is this infrastructure bill? And I think the third one is the openness and understanding that all of that will come from the private sector, not the government sector. So, they know that they need the private sector to carry the weight and they want to partner with us as much as they can.
JK: Yeah. Okay. That's, that's helpful. So, we'll wrap up on hype or hopeful there are a couple of questions I'd love to hear on, you know, future predictions and market tailwinds. You know, you've said that it's 100 trillion of GDP. 80% of it comes from physical industries, right? Given the size and scale of these physical industries, as well as some of the historical resistance to change. Are there two or three that you're looking at right now that you think are ripe for innovation in the next decade?
LS: Really good question. That one we're spending time and kind of like it's again that's our prediction. I don't know if it'll be right or wrong. I will say three industries because we spend a lot of our time in the manufacturing industry. That I think having just a tremendous change from this globalization or D globalization issues, geopolitics issues, and product lifecycle people. I mean, we have a company that building servers. Now people in our customers building three, four or five different servers every year. She used to be you build one server every five years. So, you just can't do it in Asia anymore. So, manufacturing would be the first one.
I think that analogy is the second one. I think electrification and in general, renewable will be massive. And I think we're going to see more like a standalone private company being built very large outcome out of that, that also will do good for the world. So, I think you went twice over there. And I think that failed. One will be the industrial sector, whatever we'll call that naturally. Industrial can be broad.
But you know, I think like industrial companies that we see some big changes coming out of them because they need better productivity than ever. And because the labor shortage those two things just killing them, they cannot grow. And it's clear for them that they are going to put a lot of money into technology to try and to solve, basically, productivity gain and the shortage that they're seeing with people to grow and continue to grow. So that's kind of three sectors we spend a lot of time on.
JK: I'm smiling because I feel like you're writing my fund LP deck for me here. You've also talked about this idea of investing in founders and opportunities that are obviously not just better businesses, but also better prospects for the planet. You just referenced that in our last conversation. You share a story of a portfolio company where you kind of saw that the alignment of you could build a massive business but also have this better for the planet vision.
LS: Yeah so we have a distinct we call it the three P's internally in its productivity, people, and planet. We are not climate investor, or we are not nonprofit impact investors we are here to make money through our endowments and pension funds. But I do believe there is this something amazing in operating in cutting edge technology in the physical world and I will give you an example if I can manufacture this product, my ma my air pods and I can increase the yield in 1% meaning reduce the scrap in 1%.
There is a carbon footprint to that 1% that are saved by technology. And we started the records called Eco clips carbon optimization that we released every year that we are trying to capture the value of our companies on the environment. Now this is not their business. Their business is to automate the manufacturing of the outputs.
But there is a side value that can be more impactful for the environment than companies that directly focusing on the environment. And we want to capture that value and quantify that and that's why we're doing a real day report. So, this is on the planet. Certainly, we will also talk about what we are doing on the people report goes back to your questions on yeah mission good or bad and things like that.
JK: Lior, you've been so wonderful with your time today. I'll close with a question that we ask all our guests. You know, there is a lot of doom and gloom out there in terms of the lack of climate action. We're seeing hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by oil and gas and traditional industries. Saying things are okay, everything's alright. And naturally, it can lead to a little bit of climate anxiety. You seem like a pretty optimistic guy. What is one thing that gives you hope and optimism broadly in this, whether it's better for the planet or even this this industrial transformation that we've been talking about?
LS: I’ll start by saying I'm concerned as a parent and you know to look on the amount of weather insanity that we're seeing in the last couple of years I think you know, nobody can regardless of what you believe again, and from political point of view, nobody can screw up is getting super hot and as a result we are going to see some very extreme weather situation. The thing I am bullish about because go back to a fundamental investors and build do I believe the world will move much more to use renewable energies then less.
Now the question is how long it will take and what damage we're going to do to this globe by then. But I know the end game will be that and I think we're going to get technology into a place that it will be stupid to use something that’s not clean and efficient. As we were seeing in other industries, we are not there yet on the energy side, but it is getting there. You see a penetration on electric vehicle.
JK: Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. I think ultimately, you must make the business case to people, you know, to consumers and to businesses right and moving because it's sustainable moving because it's green now moving because you're getting some tax incentives. Yeah, that's very short term, right? Yes, we must make the business case.
LS: Monotone nobody talks end of the day. It's a market. It goes up, markets goes down with this administration. And that's what we do in our companies. Your business model needs to be sustainable, regardless of the environment. If you're able to do it, good things will happen, and you will get massive adoption and we will be able to enjoy that.
JK: That's a great place to leave it. Lior, thank you so much for your time for sharing your insights with our listeners with me today. And we're excited to follow all the amazing things that Eclipse is going to be doing in the in the many years to come. So, thank you for your time today.
LS: Jay pleasure. being here.
