Lessons from a Pro: Insights from Puja Balachander

This week, I interviewed Puja Balachander. Puja is the head of Carbon13’s Venture Launchpad program investing in the future of decarbonization, an exited civic tech founder, and climate tech investor.

⚠️ Key Takeaways

💡How Puja thinks: rapid discovery and synthesis are crucial; learn generalizable skills

🛫 Journey to the space: admin & user research in civic tech → maternal & child health at the World Bank → design lead for city of Austin → civic tech founder → head of climate venture launchpad

😁 What excites Puja: interfacing with innovative startups in climate and decarbonization; how the startup model can de risk solutions for governments to scale

👋🏽 Quick Intro!

Working with established products and product teams can remove us from the challenge it is to bring a product to market. Doing so for B2C technologies is notoriously hard, as users’ preferences, interests, and tastes are subject to change frequently. Those who manage to solve that puzzle do so with commitment, ingenuity, and adaptability. Puja Balachander is one such founder, who successfully exited her civic tech startup Devie, a digital coach who helps every parent manage their children's behavior and build their social-emotional skills along the way.  She is now using her knowledge and skills to lead Carbon13’s new Venture Launchpad program.

Puja not only had to deal with the many demands of her startup but had to constantly shift with consumer preferences to make Devie the best possible product. Devie’s product was a digital coach that helps every parent manage their children’s behavior, but in order to get there, Puja had to navigate her own gaps in understanding. Her ability to adapt, address holes in her knowledge, and operate as a generalist are skills that all product people and entrepreneurs would benefit from.

Puja received her MBA from Oxford University and her BA from American University where she studied International/Global Studies. 

🎙️ The Full Story

💡 How has Puja’s experiences affected the way she thinks about and approaches problems?

Rapid discovery and synthesis

When Puja started with Devie, she first leveraged her product skills to get it off the ground. As the months went by, she found herself needing to adapt. 

“At different stages of the company, I had to be different things.” For that reason, she worked hard to develop skills in the “discovery and synthesis process,” she calls it. 

Puja says she was innovating in an “under-resourced space, so [she] just needed to learn more.” 

Many fields that are considered impact are under-resourced in similar fashions, so the need to bootstrap effectively is all the more relevant. She naturally gained that mindset from working in civic tech previously where she was switching projects every 3-6 months. 

Learn generalizable skills

Transitioning from civic tech to climate is not an obvious transition. She was able to do so, however, by, “leaning on generalizable skills that she gained as a founder, especially in the fundraising process.” It was going through those VC cycles where she realized the experience she had gained as an operator could translate to an investment role. 

Puja says, “a vast majority of skills you need…are core skills that great product managers, designers, investors, and more all have.”

Working backwards, we see with Puja and other SIP guests that getting experience in any of these fields translates well to the rest. Puja boils it down to understanding how to “align commercial and product.” In her current role, she leverages that to understand “lifecycle assessments in climate,” which allow her to make informed decisions despite her recent entrance to climate and decarbonization space. 

🛫 Puja’s journey

Puja’s journey is far from traditional; she remarks that she had, “many pivots, none of which were particularly intentional.” She first started in civic tech as an admin before moving into user research. In 2015, she joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows, where she worked as a design strategist. 

These different roles gave her a foundation in those generalizable skills mentioned previously. “I did lots of user research and was very involved in the design side of civic innovation,” Puja says.

After that, she worked at the World Bank in maternal and child health before transitioning to be the service design lead of the city of Austin. At this point, she had many diverse experiences in the public sector, but wanted to transition to the private sector. It was then that she decided to attend Oxford for their “strong social enterprise and social innovation ethos.” 

The biggest change moving to climate tech for Puja is going from “being a vertical to being a horizontal.” Climate tech isn’t a singular field and cultivating strong vertical expertise isn’t always applicable — a sentiment echoed by Puja and other SIP guests. Still, Puja has some incredible insights about her experience in civic tech that are worth sharing with some surprising parallels to how we can solve issues in climate. 

“The thing that makes [a problem] civic is that it’s government related. Essentially, you’re just doing what the government is capable of scaling up. I was testing out this new psychological intervention for families, and validating it was my job as a startup. If it works, it should be a public service. To an extent, that’s something I see in climate.”

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

Next year

Puja’s new opportunity to evaluate and support innovation in climate is incredibly exciting to her. It feeds directly to the sense of impact that motivated her previously. In addition, she “wants to be a commercial or product person” in her next endeavor, so working at Carbon13 and being able to interface with so many new technologies and business models is the ideal experience.

Next decade

The parallel between civic tech and climate is something that Puja is keenly observing. Put simply, Puja says that she sees many climate startups “doing the risky stuff governments aren’t good at doing. This derisking allows governments to scale the solutions [that are successful] up.” That model, if proven successful enough times, could revolutionize the future of public investments in private sector climate solutions.

‼️ Learn More

If you are interested in civic tech, climate investing, or would like to learn more about Puja Balachander, please reach out to Puja on LinkedIn. For those interested in Carbon13’s new Venture Launchpad program, you can read more about it here.

A huge thank you to Puja Balachander 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!