Lessons from a Pro: Insights from Jack Fritzinger

This week, I interviewed Jack Fritzinger. Jack is an expert builder who is currently running his personal consultation firm, ClimateTechCareers, Climate Founder, and The Climate Guild.

07 Apr

⚠️ Key Takeaways

💡How Jack thinks: context switching comes down to listening; look for silos of thinking; build for the long run

🛫 Journey to the space: VFA → sales & marketing at biotech startup → personal consultation firm → OnDeck fellowship program lead → relaunched consultation business & building ClimateTechCareers, Climate Founder, The Climate Guild

😁 What excites Jack: the “greening” of our workforce; dozens of new climate-oriented accelerators and incubators; working on how to help newcomers navigate the space effectively

👋🏽 Quick Intro!

Context switching and community building is crucial to a PM’s role. PMs are responsible for handling communications with people ranging from high level executives all the way to engineers, designers, and salespeople, to name a few. In order to do so, a PM has to be skilled at relationship building. It isn’t far-fetched to say the best PMs build communities around their products. 

When it comes to community building, Jack Fritzinger is one of the best, especially in climate. Coming from organizations like Venture for America and On Deck, he has worked with and learned from some of the best community builders in this space. A builder at heart, connecting communities and creating for them has always been a passion for Jack. Not only has he translated that into providing value through his personal consultation business, he is working fervently on other ways to create value for the climate movement, with recent efforts including ClimateTechCareers, Climate Founder, and The Climate Guild.

Jack attributes his ability to help different communities to a “sincere interest in the work that others are doing.” He realized long ago that although we traditionally think of the changemakers in industry to be those who go out and found their own startups and do their own things, that doesn’t have to be the only way. 

He believes and has proven that we can be “just as impactful building communities that create.” 

Jack received his B.A. from Tufts University, where he studied French, Entrepreneurship, and Communications.

🎙️ The Full Story

💡 How have Jack’s experiences affected the way he thinks about and approaches problems?

Context switching comes down to listening

According to Jack, “[context switching] comes down to listening. People are excited by what they’re working on.” By listening deeply, he’s able to ask the right questions and apply those answers in other contexts.

In order to apply those answers to other contexts, he has to recognize potential synergies in the first place. He says this is only possible when you have a genuine interest in what people are working on. Establishing that connection from the start is what catalyzes collaboration. But there’s a catch he’s noticed over the years. 

Jack says sometimes people get caught up in background research. “You should do enough research, but there is such a thing as too much. You can get trapped and never actually move towards action. Just do enough such that the connection with the person you’re chatting with is personal.”

Look for silos of thinking

In his experience context switching, there has been an indicator of success that Jack looks for. He calls them “silos of thinking”, and he commonly finds them amongst investors, academics, job seekers, and policy makers. Much of Jack’s success has been through being the one to “bridge the silos” of these different communities.

He finds that people who are successful in building multi-faceted climate companies are often “incredibly driven, very self aware, and put themselves as close to the challenge they’re trying to solve as they possibly can.” 

Build for the long run 

He said a couple statements that felt especially impactful and showed the depth with which he understands how to effectively bring people together. He is people-centric and puts a premium on investing in the longevity of a collaboration. I wanted to share those here.

“I believe in the power of strong communities. It is the connections between people that makes change possible. [Building those communities is about] how do we create a space that has the right structures to have success. [It is important that] we create the right types of bonds for folks that allow them to gain value for the rest of their lives.”

🛫 Jack’s journey

Jack was interested in startups from an early age — so much so that he changed his college major in order to dedicate more time to building companies on the side. He started out in International Relations, but switched to French in order to focus more on “starting companies and working with startups in Boston.” That kind of dedication to results and building for impact is a constant in Jack’s career.

After graduating, Jack was accepted to Venture for America, an organization that matches young professionals with opportunities at exciting startups outside of the traditional job markets in the US. 

With them, he worked at a bioterrorism defense startup, which he describes as a “huge departure…but really interesting learning experience.” It was here that he had exposure to “contracting with big government agencies.” Working with governments and government partners is a common theme among SIP’s guests, and it’s clear that the user focused and multifaceted nature of that work benefited Jack. 

During a long international travel journey spanning almost 4 years, Jack joined On Deck, a community of talented founders, operators, and investors in ClimateTech. At On Deck, he was finally able to get the “mission driven pieces” he’d been missing in his previous work. There, he helped build the On Deck Climate Fellowship program, which has since helped hundreds of people land opportunities in climate. The program no longer exists since Jack’s departure from On Deck, but its impact remains. 

Now, Jack is as busy as ever working on four main projects: 

  1. His consulting firm, Timberline Strategies — working with industry leaders to leverage early stage entrepreneurship as a key component of global climate action

  2. Climate Founder — a one-stop-shop to find community, programs, investment, talent, tools, and education related to building a climate business

  3. ClimateTechCareers — a curated list of communities, programs, job boards, education and more, all geared towards climate job seekers

  4. The Climate Guild — a highly curated community of executive-level climate leaders working to supercharge the climate tech ecosystem through multidisciplinary collaboration

😁 What is Jack most excited about in the next year? Next decade?

Next year

Jack is extremely optimistic about a trend that many of SIP’s guests are enthusiastic about — the “greening of our workforce”. He calls the tech layoffs “an inflection point” in the growth of climate efforts and climate-oriented thinking. 

According to him, there is now a pool of “highly skilled and well funded people in the workforce that are looking for something more meaningful to do.”

This is especially important to him, as this has already and will continue to supercharge his community building efforts. 

Next decade

In recent years, there has been an explosion of startup incubators, accelerators, grants, awards, and other supportive measures to help ideas of all kinds get off the ground. Jack is excited about how this is being replicated in climate, especially from his own experience at On Deck. He is wary, however, about the ups and downs that the industry will have to go through, as does any hot-button issue or technology. 

He says climate is “quickly becoming noisy and difficult to navigate.” There’s work to be done, understanding that “as more of our population switches to thinking about climate, we need to help people navigate this new and exciting space.”

‼️ Learn More

If you are interested in climate or would like to learn more about Jack Fritzinger, please reach out to Jack on LinkedIn. You can also check out his many projects: ClimateTechCareer, Climate Founder, and The Climate Guild.

A huge thank you to Jack Fritzinger for contributing to our community! I am always trying to make this content more useful and impactful. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I would love to know!