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Roberts’ journey from academic to entrepreneur to investor began after he earned a PhD at Duke in chemistry. He came to Harvard as an NSF fellow to help George Whitesides, the famed pioneer of nanotechnology. Roberts saw innovations in agriculture, water usage, manufacturing, and other areas at Harvard, MIT, as well as other universities.
“It bugged me that if I was to stick with my academic track, there really wasn’t a strong entrepreneurial community, and definitely not a commitment from venture capital, to invest in some of these topics,” Roberts said in an interview. “I said to myself, I want to be an entrepreneur.”
After working at a few companies and some startups of his own — including a nanotech company with Whitesides — Roberts shifted to the investing side, joining North Bridge Venture Partners in Waltham in 2007. A decade later, Roberts started Material Impact, a firm that focuses on early-stage startups, in materials, energy and robotics.
His special strength was his ability to help academics in the physical sciences get venture capital backing, while simultaneously helping VCs see the promise of the tech developed by academics. These days, he said, he is helping entrepreneurial people from ages “14 to 99″ develop ideas that could become climate-tech startups.
Asked about the 99-year-old’s idea, Roberts was It is important not to reveal too much. “He probably doesn’t want me to get into it too deeply, but at a high level it’s a new concept for solar materials,” he said.
While Roberts served as Secretary Ernest Moniz’s advisor to the Department of Energy. in contact with Bill Gates’s circle of advisers on climate-tech investing. In 2017, Roberts was invited to join Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a multibillion-dollar effort to accelerate needed tech developments, as the co-director of the group’s investment committee. The committee’s work is quite different from He stated that VC funding efforts are not typical because Breakthrough employs so much expertise in the field.
“I don’t think there’s another firm in history — I can’t think of one and I’m pretty good as a historian in venture — to have this much technical horsepower inside the firm,” he said.
Roberts says that he often tells entrepreneurs to treat all investors, service providers, and other companies as partners when they meet with them. “If you’re paying your lawyer, do not look at yourself as the client, try to figure out how you have a partnership,” he said. “If something goes wrong, you have a true partner who’s going to give it their all to help you.”
Roberts has supported numerous climate-tech founders with their businesses and funding. He helped Cambridge-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems last year. raise $1.8 billionTo build a prototype fusion reaction reactor in Devens. It was the largest funding round for a local startup.
“Carmichael knows how to build great companies by supporting early-stage innovative technologies to get to market,” said Commonwealth chief executive Bob Mumgaard, who honed his ideas about fusion while getting a PhD at MIT. He also praised Roberts for knowing how to translate technical theories into “an impactful commercial application.”
Roberts has “a phenomenal gift to bring people together,” added Katie Rae, managing partner at MIT-backed venture fund The Engine, who has worked on multiple deals with him.
Roberts’s life away from investing is also power-packed. He has served on the boards at Duke University, WGBH and other institutions. He was a coach for his three children’s lacrosse teams at the Berklee College of Music and the Berklee College of Music. Roberts stated that while some people seek balance by seperating work and family, he prefers overlap.
“There’s a method to my madness, where the things I tend to do have elements that are symbiotic with other stuff, including things that could be interesting to my family,” he said.
Roberts, for example, has a book club that he and his oldest daughter organize. She chooses the titles, and he arranges the schedule. This allows Roberts to still have time to read in between his peripatetic travels. After returning to Brookline, North Carolina, Roberts fit in an interview with Globe. He was about ready to depart on a trip which included Arkansas, California, Arizona.
“She finds books that have things that she would like me to think about that have nothing to do with climate change or the kind of topics I’m working on, but things that have a lot to do with the human spirit,” he said.
The most recent book they shared was Ted Chiang’s short-story collection “Exhalation.” Chiang is best known for writing the story of alien first contact used for the movie “Arrival,” but Roberts said it wasn’t the science fiction that drew him in. “He has a little bit of tech in there, a little bit of sci-fi, but a lot of great development of the characters and the drama,” Roberts said.
It’s an apt description of the book and also Roberts’s 20-year journey turning scientific breakthroughs into companies and products that can make a difference.
Although Roberts may know about the potential for technology to help mitigate climate change, he’s not sure humanity will be able to overcome the problems in time.
“The situation is only getting worse, but what I see in people’s behavior, as a call to action, that gives me hope,” he said. “Circumstances are getting worse, and the response is greater than I could have imagined. So it’s going to be an interesting collision.”
Aaron Pressman can reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ampressman.
