By Katherine Fung

Copyright newsweek

Dozens of climate founders, startup employees, investors and consultants from around the world joined Megan Fraser and Lucia Schweigert on Wednesday morning to figure out how they could communicate their leadership more effectively to investors.Fraser, an executive coach for climate pioneers, and Schweigert, a strategic director at Europe’s leading climate tech communications agency, Life Size, led participants from New York City, London, Hong Kong, Panama City and beyond in a two-hour virtual workshop, “Investor-Ready Leadership for Climate Tech Founders: The Skills and Strategy to Secure Funding.””We are going to bring together two topics that usually are seen as quite separate things, leadership and pitching,” Fraser said at the top of the event.Climate investors around the world are facing investment challenges as economic pressures and political landscapes further uncertainty among investors, who are responding with caution.A July report from Net Zero Insights found that global investment in climate tech was down by 19 percent in the first half of 2025, when compared to the same period in 2024. Data from Dealroom.co, a data and insights provider in the startup space, shows that climate tech venture capital funding fell sharply in 2023 and has steadily decreased since. Trends show after hitting $75.6 billion and $75.2 billion in 2021 and 2022, respectively, VC funding dropped to $49.8 billion in 2023 and $39.1 billion in 2024.Wednesday’s workshop was among hundreds of events that are taking place as part of Climate Week NYC.Newsweek is hosting its own events on September 24 and 25. Pillars of the Green Transition, which is set to take place next Wednesday, will bring specific case studies on energy storage, food systems and bioenergy to audiences at the magazine’s New York headquarters. Powering Ahead, which is scheduled for next Thursday, will focus on innovations in energy and plastics technology.On Wednesday, Fraser and Schweigert made the case that success depends on much more than just tech.”Investors aren’t only backing your technology, they’re also backing you,” Fraser said. “They’re reading your leadership signals every time you speak with them and interact with them. [The problem is] most founders don’t know how to make those signals intentional.”To kick things off, Fraser invited attendees to describe how their weeks were going in an emoji. One attendee from Panama used a seedling emoji, while another in London used a rocket ship emoji. A third in Cambridge used a bee emoji to signal they were “busy and pollinating.”Participants were all eager to learn which leadership signals investors were looking for and how to stay grounded under pressure. Fraser reminded founders that while it can be tempting to get everything about their company across, what matters most is figuring out what their prospective investors are focused on.”If you don’t know what your investors care about, you’re flying blind,” she said.She added that investors are not only assessing ideas, but the person behind the ideas and whether they believe that individual can carry a venture through a storm. She urged founders to cultivate clarity, conviction, self-awareness, team leadership and adaptability in their pitches.Schweigert then offered real ways for founders to work these concepts into their pitches, suggesting that they keep their design elements simple and accessible, that they demonstrate their awareness through their strengths rather than their weaknesses and that they use visuals to convey who their team is and what their history is.Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss which idea was the hardest for them to get through to investors, before coming back with a consensus: Clarity. Attendees spoke about how it was easy to articulate the problem they were trying to answer, but how much harder it was to lay out the specific solution their work proposed. One person said that they found comfort in hearing that everyone was facing the same issue.”It’s like you’re rowing in a big regatta. You see other people rowing, and you’re like, ‘Okay, we’re all kind of going in a direction,'” they said.Fraser and Schweigert also laid out a four-quadrant model on how to approach high-stakes situations. The two women said that climate tech founders often found themselves getting stuck in what they described as “high intention and high attachment” scenarios that caused significant anxiety over decision-making. They warned that in these situations, because every “no” can feel existential, founders risk pushing too hard in conversations, over-indexing on key metrics and feeling burnt out.Instead, they advised founders to put themselves in “high intention and low attachment” scenarios. In these situations, founders are clear on their goals without desperately clinging to specific outcomes. This allows founders to pivot without spiraling and adjusting course in the case of setbacks, Fraser said.She led participants through an exercise that required recalling what it felt like to be under pressure, before Schweigert offered dos and don’ts when delivering a pitch. Schweigert emphasized the importance of talking slowly, before sending participants back to the breakrooms to reintroduce themselves with a more deliberate pace.At the end, attendees all signed off by sharing the biggest takeaway of the event. And although it was a simple strategy, the most popular answer was to “slow down.”