Who am i & background

Who am i?

I’m Clémentine, and i’m an entrepreneur on a journey to fight climate change.

I’m an engineer by training, and I have had a few differents business lifes where i was :

🔌👔 2007-2012 : a strategy consultant mostly focused on energy topics, serving utilities,producers or retailers in Europe

💸 🌍 2013-2016 : an impact venture investor, developing impact investing funds in developing countries, but also (briefly) a plain vanilla venture capitalist

💻 💕 2017-2022 : an tech entrepreneur, developing a dating app cumulating 10+ million users in 8 european countries, exited in 2021 to a dating conglomerate.

Everyone has its own climate journey - here is my modest one

I don’t consider myself as particularly early climate fighter.

I think we all have our individual climate journey, which starts in different places (travel, food, clothes, waste, heating, politics…)

I thought I had a pretty sober life, i have always hated buying clothes or shoes or material things in general, i was avoiding travel when possible. I thought i was on the good side of things. But I was flying to Toulouse, my home town, because it was practical. When living abroad, of course i was flying as well. I have 3 kids, i bought a car in 2021 to drive them around.

My (real) climate journey has started in 2019 when my 5 years old daughter asked my “why it was SOOOOO warm”, on our way to school, at 8.30am on a Tuesday in May.

What am i going to tell my kids?

Why haven’t we (adults) found a solution? For them?

Then COVID showed us change WAS possible when we’re collectively in danger.

I remember having around that time a conversation with a dear friend; we were telling ourselves that, as Humankind, we have a freaking BIG problem, and we also have a very weird, irrational way to deal with it.

With a problem of the magnitude of climate change, we should in theory stop everything we’re doing, allocate our best resources to work on it and find solutions, and not pause until we figured out how to crack it.

Nobody is coming to save us.

Tech might save us, but it’s still too early to know for sure.

So i decided the best thing I can do, is to dedicate my daily hours to solve climate change.

When i decided to relaunch (dec 22), after having exited my first company, it was pretty clear i could not do anything else but acting on climate.

So i have spent 3 months looking at how to maximize my climate impact (in CO2 reduction), with my 2 arms and my brain. And which battle to pick. Spoiler : there is no silver bullet. No single solution that is going to fix it all.

In this process, I have found “my” topic, and i’m launching a new company very soon (we’re now in June 23).

When i shared this journey, i got super positive feedback and people asked me to share my notes. So there you go 🙂

You can reach me at clementine.lalande@gmail.com or +33699569234