Today I am with Gaby Darbyshire. Gaby is the founder and general partner at Dangerous Ventures, a seed-stage climate fund. Before moving to LA and starting Dangerous, Gaby was the co-founder of Gawker, the massive online media business that included Jezebel, Gizmodo, Valleywag, Deadspin, Life Hacker and others. She was also an environmental lawyer and has quickly become one of my favorite people and VCs in LA.

You know, Gabby. I thought we could start with Gawker. Of course it's interesting but it also just highlights how much Operational and company building background you have. So let's start there. How did Gawker get going? You were living with Nick, right?

Yeah, so I had moved to San Francisco for what I thought was year on a comment from a consulting firm in the UK and I'd been a lawyer in the UK before that, you know, barrister wearing a wig and gown in court every day.

You wore a wig?

Oh yeah. I started a non-profit for people on death row in the Caribbean and I did environmental litigation, you know, dioxine contamination, I'd worked on nuclear power, various things like that.
Okay, we'll come back to that cuz that's relevant to your climate fund that you're doing now. But, but, a throughline.
but somehow then Gawker got started after you've been wearing this wig
Okay, so I was wearing a wig and whatnot,
and
then realized I didn't
want to be a politician or a judge, which is sort of the ultimate goal if you're embarrassed in the uk. So
I left the law and became a management consultant.
And that ended up taking me to Silicon Valley in 1999
and the rest, as they say is history. I got caught up in the internet world, became entrepreneurial, you know, C-Suite executive, you've got a lawyer and a management consultant. You're pretty useful
in startup
it. Mm-hmm.
and ended up doing a bunch of different startups and was very close friends with Nick, had been for many years in London.
So basically, whilst I was in Silicon Valley, Nick
had moved to New York and I was gonna get, go back to England and decided to stop off in New York for a while and was running this wine
company from New York and Nick and I were
roommates and he had started
a company called
Kinder, which was a sort of directory of blogs at the time, a tech business.
And, Then he wanted us to start a media company, and we were living together at the time, and I was running this wine business, but we would talk about it all the time. And he said, let's, do this together. And I said, well, I can't do it yet.
I'm running this company and you know, you haven't got enough for me to do and there aren't enough people and we're not sure if this is gonna the truth is it was, and it was growing and it became increasingly fascinating. So he built a small team of the first editors and all the rest of it, and I helped him so strategically, Edges
and then eventually decided to jump over full time about nine months
in. And at that
point I moved out to the apartment and the next day I moved back in and my bedroom was turned into the office.
And what's the, you know, however long of a story you wanna tell of like how Gawker became Gawker from there?
goer actually started
as, the first site was actually
Gizmodo
and it was called
Blog Wire.
and then Goca was actually the second title launched. And then we sort quickly went on to launch a bunch of other titles like Life Hacker and I nine and all the other ones in the
Yeah. Jebel cuz
Bel, Gizmoto,
all of those.
Yep. I think at one point the Maxim we had launched was about 18 titles.
Wow.
But we, you know, we sold some, we closed some when things weren't working, you know, we took chances. Decided to start things and then see what worked and what didn't. And sometimes
it was
the wrong category for us, or our sales people. You needed to be a specialist. Let's say it was music or travel.
And so we would sell those properties on
and
others we shut down when they weren't working so well.
and the name was changed to Goki Media. Because Goca was really the most famous of the
sites and
the most sort of fun and interesting, and of course that's a double edged sword because these days most people think of Goca Media as just the entity, just the site goca, and that is tarred with the brush, obviously the bankruptcy.
But most people forget that it was actually a much bigger entity and it had all these other properties.
And it was a huge, I mean, Media Empire might be wrong, but like online you were one of the biggest properties.
I mean, it was certainly,
the most pioneering digital media company of its
age. It was also
the most profitable. We were profitable from our second year of operation, unlike most of the others that spent a lot of money to get
growth. Mm-hmm. , I think
proportionately there was a point at which if we had.
All of our titles as different sections of a newspaper. We would've been second only to the New York Times in size, Anyway, the
point of the whole thing is that very far wide reaching tent.
point. Mm-hmm.
Enormous pride in building something like that. I remember young women used to come up to me
and say, I read Jebel in college and it made me feminist, so thank you.
Yeah.
And I thought that was just great. Yeah. so, you know,
for all the detractors, all the people who loved it, all the people who hated it, and the day, it was a pretty amazing business to have built and run.
how did you think about the business model? Like what made it successful?
Well, I
think
in
media
particularly, there's an ineffable sort of, , quality, which is just having incredibly good judgment and tone on the content
and
creating content that people really
want.
You know, content is king. People say that in every media business. that exists, whether it's television or film or anything else. , and so, Our whole business was really editorial first, and editorial always won. And because we were privately held, we didn't necessarily feel the need to capitulate to advertise at demands, which is
one of the reasons that
we did the kind of coverage that some people didn't like cuz because we were not concerned about whether or not we had to please advertisers so much.
And if there was ever a. Editorial tend to win.
And
I think that makes people feel that you're authentic you know, we always said that GOCO mentality was shining a bright light in dark corners,
but
that can very quickly, get me into trouble because I start saying, you know what was great about goco?
And then people will say, well, what about the bad
stuff? And it's not
Relevant to
talk about that. Now we all know what happened.
It's ,not particularly interesting to rehash, you know, what ended the company. But I do think that the
learnings
from having tricky times or having to deal with restructuring a company in a recession or having to, you know, cut staff but still motivate
people, these are incredibly, I.
Tools to have and your arsenal, as a business builder of any sort.
it's super relevant. I mean, so many startups have ups and downs. Um, what did you do for the restructuring?
Well, when the
recession came in 2008, you know, , there was blood in the water with everybody, most C'S revenues were falling off a cliff.
and so we had a choice. We could either lay some people off or we could give everybody a pay cut
across the
board and
keep as many people as we
could. And we chose to do latter. So we build. Structure that basically said if people could, you know, maintain anything close to the levels of revenue that we'd had the year before, not only would you get your full pay back, but you get a ratchet on a bonus and.
Everybody said, that's fine. We're in this together. Not one person quit.
Wow. And
at the end of the year, we discovered that we'd grown 45% in revenue when everybody else fell off a cliff.
And I ended
up paying out so much money in bonuses in 2009 that people were making more money than they made before the recession.
So
it worked
out really
well. I don't know if we could have predicted that in advance, but we did
the right
things to keep the team morale high and to figure out a way to make sure the business could continue to operate at the best. Abilities in a difficult
thing. Mm-hmm. . Uh, let's talk about dangerous then Dangerous ventures. That's right. yeah. Give me the overview.
So,
dangerous
Ventures is a, seed and precede stage fund , that backs founders who are trying to build a more resilient and healthy
planet and people on the planet.
So we
fundamentally believe that the. Billion or trillion dollar businesses will be in this space.
There is unbelievably pressing and important problems that need to be solved in the climate, environmental space, and that. Is no longer a nice to have. It's an imperative and passionate and dedicated founders who really want to find ways to improve the health of the planet, will build the dominant companies of the future.
And we wanna back them and we wanna find them at an early stage. And we wanna help them build difficult companies.
want to share an example or two?
Yeah, we've made a couple of investments
So far.
our fund's very new.
So one of the companies we, we decided to
invest in.
When it was actually only 45 days old when it came to us, is a crazy space solar
company.
It's a stealth company. Can't say more about it,
but Sea Solar.
space,
solar. Uh, so that one's pretty interesting. Uh, that's all I can say on that topic.
the
one that I find
quite fascinating at the moment is a battery technology, which is an additive that. Batteries from catching fire.
but it
has this unintended, well, not unintended, but
they're billing it as a safety product. But actually one of the consequences are, is if you can reduce the chances of a fire and an electric battery, which is like 400.
Cells, then you don't need to have such a thick housing around the battery that protects them and prevents fire from spreading. And if you do that, that means the price of the materials of building the car comes down because the battery is less heavy. And if the battery's less heavy, then the range of the vehicle goes up,
And
I love that
kind of, you know, symbiosis of all these
elements. That one makes me
very excited. And we are also interested in human resilience, which is about anything from mental health or reskilling or upskilling, helping people deal better with a changing environment.
And tell me who are your partners at dangerous my two partners Dangerous Ventures are Mike and Ward,
Mike had an energy company that did solar and micro. Finance in Africa. And Ward , was a co-founder of Axiom Legal, which sort of disrupted the legal landscape and then was sold to Premier. So between us, we've had, you know, a billion dollars in exits of companies we've founded Axiom was a big legal company, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was, it was an
interesting model.
They basically,
disrupted the legal landscape cuz it enabled lawyers to do high level lawyering, but not in big firms. So they could pick and choose their sort of own schedule and how they worked for, different startups on a sort of day or two a month contract basis, rather than having to work for a big firm and be on staff.
so do you guys have. Particular thesis areas that you've developed that you're really passionate about,
Yes.
I'm personally
fascinated by water.
, we love water
and fire in particular.
Fire and flood mitigation are really, um, interesting to us um, I think I introduced you to Aaron Fe. He came on this show and he said something like The worst wildfire years we had in California was in 2018. And then it was in 2019 and then it was in 2020 or something. I mean, it was just one of those, you're like,
it's just getting worse and it's not
stopping.
Yeah. Yeah.
So there's an awful
lot of fire related businesses starting up. In fact, I think there's a couple of funds that dedicate themselves only to, investing in fire related businesses. So these niche areas are becoming bigger and bigger.
I think that's fantastic. The great thing about being in the space that we are in is that everyone we work with is incredibly collaborative, cuz we're all seeking the same goal, So the introductions
and the deal flow is actually quite surprisingly good

Yeah. Someone said to me like, if Software Eats the world was the theme a decade ago, climate Eats the world is the theme now. Cuz it's everywhere.
So
it should be,
I'd say, you know, at the end of the day,
I feel like it would be delightful if all the brightest brains in the world. Focusing their energies on solving climate problems rather than, you know, building another widget or another ad tech business or another thing we don't need.
I feel like a lot of my friends who are very smart, very passionate about climate I feel like they get intimidated to, like, jump into climate investing or whatever because they feel like they don. No, they don't have the background in it.
I feel that that's a real shame.
I think if people want to take their smarts and their brains and apply it to different areas where their skills could have some relevance, they should do
it.
Mm-hmm.
I'm not a deep expert in any one of these particular topics. I have a very strong and deep general environmental, you know, through line in my life, but it doesn't mean I'm an expert. Batteries yet.
And frankly,
it's quite hard launching a VC fund and it's
quite hard
doing anything, that's new and different. And you have to maintain that sense of, you know, belief and grit. Otherwise you wouldn't do anything.
So I say to them,
go work in climate.
yeah. I mean, but also I think you've spent a lot of your life around world changing people, big personality, people
like you.
Yes.
we're just getting to know each other. and you know, it is an interesting. Thing that the more time I spend in entrepreneurship or in venture, like the more I believe that yes people can, like, individuals can shape the world.
Like I don't wanna go back to goer, but like you shape the world it changed, as you said, so many people were influenced by what you guys built,
what I love to say
about GOER is that the goer alumni network is wide ranging. Yeah. And deep. and everyone in the media these days at some point worked for
us. So yeah,
there is something
about, having been at a particular place at a particular time and. It was heading exciting those days in New York and the media world. wouldn't change them for the
world. Despite all the lawsuits and there were many,
Leo. So, but let's talk about your background a little bit, because you have, you were in environmental law before, right? so my background is I was always a scientist.
I was actually a scientist at Cambridge.
and I loved it. So I
was always a bit of a nerd and.
Realized that I was
not necessarily cut out for a life in the lab. I'm too much of a
social animal.
Anyway, the point is, I,
pursued being a lawyer for other reasons, but was particularly tapped
to use my
scientific knowledge.
scientific and environmental
cases. So before I
became a barrister, I was at a big firm called Freshfields and they had a multi-year case about nuclear power. And But I think you told me that it was like the biggest case and I hadn't heard of it, and you're like, it was
Oh, yeah. Before the McDonald's libel trial in the
uk, it was the largest litigation the UK had ever had. And what was even crazier was that British
nuclear fuels, which was the nuclear power station
that was being
sued,
was underwritten by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which meant that the legal fees for.
Defendant
and the legal
fees for the plaintiff, which was legally aided,
were both paid
for by the taxpayer
for the largest case in British history, which was sort
of
of that sounds like an American thing.
And it had
something like
a hundred experts ranged on both sides of the debate, including Sir Richard
Doll,
who was the man who found the, link between smoking and lung
cancer. And
Taza Numora, who's the man who'd spent 30 years studying the effects of Hiroshima. And the whole thing was about, nuclear. Contamination from a fire that they had in 1957 and whether it could cause, , inherited leukemia Fascinating.

And now do you support nuclear? Do you worry about it? Uh, what is keeping you up at night?
I mean, I worry a lot about lithium mining
right now. Right?
It's like we can't, keep doing this without the raw materials. And if we're gonna have the same situations we had 30 years ago with blood diamonds, right? And the supply chain being, less than optimal, we're gonna build ourselves a whole bunch of problems all over again.
Do you wanna dig in a tiny bit on that? Like where are we right now with lithium mining? I'm not an expert on lithium mining. I just think about it a
lot. and that's
partly, this is a segue into my other environmental things I care about. I'm on the board of
an organization called Global Witness, which is
brilliant and everyone should go and
support it. , they've been around 30
years. They're based in London, but they're global and they basically a little bit of the you know, shining a bright light in dark corners. They expose corrupt. In the environmental space and sort of essentially, do big studies around land defenders, people who are murdered in the Amazon for
protecting
their land.
they do a lot of investigation into sort of oil and gas lobbying and, , they did something really interesting at COP last year and discovered that, I'm gonna get this slightly wrong, I'm
sure, but
something like, the oil
and gas industry
had 10 times
the
number of
lobbyists at cop. Than any other, delegation.
Individually,
I mean really extreme stuff. they were
the ones who
coined the term blood diamond 30
years
coined.
for work they did in the Congo.
Anyway, they're
extraordinary. And I've been on their board for a long time, and so I sort of have a. An understanding of a lot of the issues that come around.
The sort of, you know, the supply chain that's necessary to keep the western world happy in its needs for power and
extraordinary. you have this through line that I think you mentioned of shining a, a light in dark places. You know, why is that your through line?
I think it's because I always
up with
pretty strong minded people around me who tended to want to champion the
underdog.
And
as a barrister, if you
are working, you got someone's
life in your hands, right? If you are defending someone in criminal charge,
if you get it wrong,
they go to jail for life.
And I think I was particularly
struck by the fact
that even though the British. Legal system had abolished a death penalty in 1957 that had not happened in the Commonwealth countries, especially in the Caribbean. And therefore death row cases in the Caribbean would end up in the Privy Council in the UK cuz that was the highest court of appeal.
And lawyers
who are young and Chin would take on pro bono death row.
Mm.
in The uk.
and I did
that and I started a charity for people on death row in, the
Caribbean. And
I feel like that probably shaped me into what was already there, which is a very strong belief in defending the underdog. and I always made this joke that, you know, I started my career defending people in death row and then found myself defending goer's, right?
To run stories that people thought were. Defending the underdog were in fact bullying. but I
will say that goer's overarching principle was indeed shining a bright light
in dark corners and exposing hypocrisy. And that was a very, very clear mission.
Mm. What did your parents do? Where do you think that came?
Oh, my mother,
Mm. What is your mom?
she's, strong.
Oh. Have
you heard her life story? You'd
Want her on this podcast where were you? Where was high school? What were they doing when you were in high school?
Well, I was
born in the Middle East.
my father spent several decades and was a Middle East. I'll say no more on that topic right now, but it's another interesting conversation.
my
mother and father met in Teran in, Iran, and I was born in Beirut
and then grew up in
London and my father died when I was quite young.
, and. They got divorced. So I actually grew up with my mother. So single mom, two kids working single mother strong as hell. very much
the definition of keep calm and carry on and step up a
lip. British stuff, never complain, never a victim, you know, just get on and do it. And I think that's really shapes you.
It's
very,
very clear where these principles come
someone just asked me this morning like, what advice do I have for entrepreneurs in these tough markets and stuff? And it was kind of that.
It's grit. It's grit. That the best. yeah. I think tell the truth is really the key.
I mean, gosh, all the stuff that's going on right now, in
which regard?
I don't know, you know, ftx, all of the rest of them, like
all the, the ways in
which you can see the signals, but you choose to ignore them because you want into a
deal, all that kind of stuff. It's like,
I've had this
belief that the venture isn't chess. Cuz if it was, you could build an algorithm to crack it.
It's more
like poker,
where if you've got
really good skills, you can figure out. More often than not, how to help your hand be a winning
hand,
And would you agree though, that sometimes trying to judge. The line between brilliance and craziness. Like when you're looking at the Elon Musk, I don't know, trying to judge that is hard
dunno, I feel like.
We have gut, right? And I think that we should trust our gut. I don't think it's formulaic. I think you do know when you meet somebody, whether or not they're a good person, you can tell that they could be a fascinatingly charismatic person that you may or may not like. But I think you've got a pretty good sense, I dunno about you.
I have a pretty good sense of whether someone's a bad person or not.
I'm not quite sure how else you can protect against it, except do your diligence very carefully and make sure not to believe everything that you're told.
Yeah. any other advice for sort of entrepreneurs? Like, you had to learn a lot of business skills, I assume, on the job.,
yeah,
I already had. Science degree
and a law degree and I wasn't gonna go and get an MBA as well,
So yes, I did
learn an all on job.
But even if you'd had an mba, right? Like you were still going to be learning on, the job. you know, do you have advice for entrepreneurs? This is a pretty broad question, but just like advice can be things you would've done differently, wish you'd known.I think that letting go of control and trusting other people is key.
And recognizing when it doesn't matter.
One of the, my big, bug bears is whenever people ask me to help look over a job spec or help them hire someone, I get a two or three page thing with all this detail about what this person. Have as a, you know, background. And I look at it and I think, God, most of the people who are offering me this piece of paper don't even meet this themselves.
And the more you
put these rules and criteria down, the more you exclude really good candidates. And partly this is me as a feminist saying, you know,
women
have that thing where they think they know less and so
they don't put
themselves forward. And men think they know more, and so they do and they rise the challenge.
And that means that a lot of really good people are being excluded because, Piece of paper in front of them makes 'em
feel unwanted. And
I think
more like the sort of Shell Sandberg, Larry Summer's story, uh, which is get on a rocket ship. You dunno where it's going. Yeah. it doesn't matter if it's not exactly the job you thought it was gonna be, if that's true of you deciding to take a job at a company.
It should also be true of a company deciding to take a person on as a
hire, which is. Are they smart? Can they learn? Will they adapt? Do they have resilience and grit? And if
they don't have
the exact skills to model this or know that, I'll teach
them. Do you feel like you have that confidence?
to learn anything?
you come across as quite confident. Do you feel that, like when you approach a new situation,
I
generally feel
that if I don't know it, I can work it out,
but it doesn't mean I don't have the same, fraud, complex imposter syndrome that most women have.
I do believe
that people will figure out I'm not quite as smart as. They are. I think I
am really,
um, definitely we all have
that. I mean, I
think anyone
who's got some humility and self-awareness must have it because it's natural to believe that there are other people around you that are smarter than
you. Mm-hmm. ,
right? If
you have self-awareness I do on the other hand, tend to believe. If I try hard enough and I use that grit and determination mm-hmm.
and I apply myself,
that I will either learn enough to do the job well
or I will know who
to go find to surround myself with, who does,
the Yeah. I mean, I just heard Melody Hobson say essentially like, If you're saying something to me and I'm not getting it, you're just not a very good explainer.
There you go.
so something like
that. That's
totally reasonable at
the end
of the day. Communication is probably the key, skill that you need as a leader.
Right. A leader needs to inspire.
day.
And the only way
you
can inspire is if people understand what you are saying me. One more question on this theme, which is just like what you just said was at goer you had all this talent that now is in the diaspora or something. and now it's essentially the same thing as a vc. You're spotting talent.
Bingo.
Do
That's why it appeals
to
me.
Yeah. Do you have ways that, you know, are there questions you tend to ask or just ways to approach getting to know someone a little deeper?
Um, So
I'm pleased that, we are coming out of the pandemic and it's, you know, easy for us to meet founders in person, I think there's an awful lot that you can do just by asking nice, sensible, clean, clear questions, and getting to know someone. Like people tend to show you who they are and if you spend enough time with.
I think it's time, though.
I think they spend time
time. With him. It's another cycle. It's
another
cycle,
yeah.
But silver linings on recessions,
you get great talent at an affordable price. You're not competing with the most, you know, highly paying companies out there. I think for climate it's great cuz when the delta between the rewards you get out of startup and the stock that you think is gonna be worth a lot in the future and the stock price.
Now, you know when that delta
gets smaller.
More people jump ship to do something that they really care
about. a hundred percent. anything surprised you about starting a fund? Anything you've changed your mind on or,
it's as exhausting as being a founder,
So
I think I'd forgotten quite how relentless. Sort of building block period is
There's just so
much to do.
Yes. And then
you're trying to also talk to LPs and get them to, you know, believe in your vision and you're also trying to look at a hundred or 200 companies and meet founders and decide which ones you wanna back. And you're trying to do
all of this
at the same time. And I used to say, in all the companies I've started, and particularly Goca, I said that the trainer had left the station and I was frantically out in front laying the chain
track. Yeah. And I feel like that
again, and I
haven't. In some
time.
but
that's where the grit determination comes in cuz you know, you'll get through it.
Is just a phase. Yeah.
And
at the other end is something really interesting and really a great way to spend one's
life,
helping
brilliant, passionate people bring their dreams to reality and improve the lot of the world.
Who wouldn't
wanna do that?
People who get exhausted easily. I guess
Yeah.
how do you balance that? Like when you are going to bed at night and you're like, there's so many things I'm supposed to be doing.
I'm a very organized person.
Interesting. Yeah. Really?
Yeah.
And I, I
happen to
love just, I don't know whether it's less or something like that.
I just, I don't lose track of what I have to get done cuz I keep it very well organized in my brain.
Yeah, but also on paper. Okay. I'm, I'm not kidding. Like I have a system. We all have our systems. ,
I'm pretty much an inbox zero kind of
person. Cuz I think that mental clarity comes from having a clear, focused set of goals in front.
So that's just my
way. I mean, everybody has their own way, but when people say,
how do I do better time management?
I'm like, have a system
and stick to it
and have a clear set of goals. That's, that's good
good too. Yes.
Yeah. Cuz I think you can have the clearest paperwork. I'm good at getting shit done. Mm-hmm. , but it's not always towards the right goal. I could run up the wrong mountain like five
Right.
I mean, I think that's the issue,
isn't it?
It's like you end up doing what's urgent and critical
and what's right
in front of you, and you forget to do the important things.
And so
you have to find a system whereby you carve out the time to have the quiet focus,

So true. So last question why la
Perfectly
simple reason my partner. Was offered his dream job here in LA and I thought about doing long distance back and forth and realized I'm too old for that, or he basically said he was too old for that.
And I said, fine, let's give it a shot. And I love and
will always be a New Yorker in my heart, but I have to say I really love LA
And we came
here in January of 2020 and as we all
know what
happened in March of 2020, It was pretty amazing to have been here
for ,the
pandemic rather than a,
Manhattan apartment.
Do you have a surfboard rack on your
Vesta? I do. And that Vesta, by the way,
has been a daily
driver for nine months of the year
in Manhattan for
more than 14
years. Yeah,
is you roll up looking like the coolest person ever in your blue VESA with your little surfboard on the
side.
Well, you know,
you, you, gotta try. I mean, at the end of the day,
if you're gonna come and
live in a, a playground like Los
Angeles, you might as
well play.
Um, well, Gabby, I know you're gonna be a big presence in LA and I love it. I'm so glad we get to be friends. I
am so delighted.
It's been really a great joy and so a
shout out to Matthew Step for having the wisdom to put us
shout out to stca. I love it. Thanks for coming on the
pod.
It's my
pleasure.