From Harvard Business School to Rural Africa: Nicole Poindexter’s Journey to Advance Clean Energy Access
Release Date: 01/01/2025
Bruce Friedrich (Good Food Institute) on Taste, Price, and What It Takes to Scale Alternative Meat
Business for Good Podcast
Alternative meat looks like it is collapsing. Startups are shutting down, funding is drying up, and headlines are calling the category finished, but that reaction may reflect a misunderstanding of how technological revolutions actually unfold. Bruce Friedrich, President of the Good Food Institute and author of Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food and Our Future, explains why most people will not change behavior for values alone, why price and taste are the real adoption gates, and why “only” $3 billion in cultivated meat funding is far...
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Modern Mill’s Chris Guillmond on Upcycling Rice Hulls Into Low Maintenance Building Materials
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary A rice field does not look like the starting point for a scalable building materials company until you understand the economics behind it. In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Chris Guimond, Founder and CEO of Modern Mill, to explore how discarded rice hulls are being transformed into ACRE, a wood like siding, decking, and trim product designed to replace old growth lumber. Chris explains why deforestation is a supply and demand problem, how Modern Mill cracked the manufacturing and adoption challenges that derail most composites, and...
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Deep Fission: Using Boreholes to Cut Nuclear Costs and Deliver 24/7 Clean Electricity
Business for Good Podcast
What if the fastest path to reliable clean electricity is not a new reactor design, but a new place to put one? In this conversation, Paul Shapiro speaks with Elizabeth Muller, CEO of Deep Fission, about a plan to place a conventional pressurized water reactor roughly a mile underground to use geology, gravity, and groundwater for containment, pressure, and emergency cooling, potentially cutting total nuclear costs by as much as 80%. They unpack how a narrow borehole reactor could serve always-on demand from data centers and industrial users, what “proven tech combined in a new...
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The Incredible, Edible… Pea? How Meala is Using Biotech to Render Eggs Obsolete
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever checked the ingredients on a baked good, you know how ubiquitous eggs are. They bind, they lift, they emulsify, they hold moisture — they’re simply the structural engineers of cookies, cakes, and muffins everywhere. But they’re also volatile: prices spike, supply chains break, and for anyone with an egg allergy or who’s avoiding eggs for animal welfare or environmental reasons, eggs aren’t exactly a welcome ingredient to find on the ingredient deck. Enter Hadar Ekhoiz Razmovich, CEO and co-founder of , an Israeli startup that’s figured out how to make peas...
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From Oil Wells to Oak Trees: Ben Dell’s Half-Billion-Dollar Pivot to Carbon Offsetting
Business for Good Podcast
What if planting trees could be not just good for the planet, but also a profitable business? In this episode, I’m talking with Ben Dell, the founder and CEO of — a company that’s raised nearly $400 million, including $250 million of that in 2025, to turn farmland back into thriving native forests across the United States. And he’s already forging major carbon removal deals with the likes of Microsoft and Mercedes F1. Ben’s journey is a fascinating one: he began his career in oil and gas private equity, helping fossil-fuel companies optimize their operations. But during the...
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Ready for a Carpet Made of Human Hair? This Entrepreneur Turns Salon Waste into Textiles
Business for Good Podcast
What if one solution to fashion’s waste problem is literally growing on our own heads? Every day, salons around the world toss out millions of pounds of freshly cut human hair — a clean, protein-rich, renewable resource that mostly ends up in landfills or incinerators. But what if that so-called waste could become the next sustainable textile? My guest on this episode, Zsofia Kollar, is the founder and CEO of , a Netherlands-based startup turning salon hair waste into a high-performance fibre that behaves like wool — but with 43 times lower CO₂ emissions, 20 times less water use, and...
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From Fashion Model to Fission Mission: Isabelle Boemeke’s Nuclear-Powered Future
Business for Good Podcast
When you hear the word nuclear, does your mind flash to mushroom clouds, Chernobyl, or maybe the glowing three-eyed fish from The Simpsons? Well, what if nuclear electricity — far from being an environmental villain — is actually one of the safest, cleanest, and most land-efficient energy sources we have? It turns out that former fashion model Isabelle Boemeke is on a mission to change how we think about nuclear energy. When she and I met a few years ago, in Italy of all places, she was known by many simply as , her online persona that blends fashion, futurism, and fission to make nuclear...
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Fungi-Filled Diapers: How Plastic-Eating Fungi May Change Child-Rearing
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever changed a diaper, you might’ve wondered what happens to it after it goes in the trash. The answer, unfortunately, is that it’ll sit in a landfill for hundreds of years—certainly longer than the baby who briefly wore it will live. In fact, every diaper you wore when you were a baby is still sitting around, at best in a landfill, or perhaps even in the ocean. And did you know the average American baby goes through 6,000 diapers before learning to use a toilet? But what if fungi could change that? In this episode, I sit down with serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal, the...
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Raising Capital for Alt-Protein in the Midst of the Winter
Business for Good Podcast
Recently had me as a guest on his show, the to talk about ’s . When it came out, more than one Business for Good listener heard it and told me they thought it would make a good episode to release to our audience too, so this episode is simply the conversation Alex and I had for his podcast. If you’ve been following the alternative protein sector (and the broader biotech sector), you’ve likely seen the wave of challenges that fermentation, cultivated, and plant-based startups have faced over the past few years. As recent reporting confirms, ag and food tech investment is at a...
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Bottling the Sky: Aircapture’s Carbon Capture Breakthrough
Business for Good Podcast
When you think about climate change solutions, your mind might go to renewable energy, electric vehicles, or eating less meat. These are all of course important. But even if we stopped all emissions today, we’d still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere and would need to pull a lot of our emissions out of it. That’s the bold mission of , a California-based company pioneering modular direct air capture technology. On this episode, I speak with , Aircapture’s founder and CEO, about how his company is not only working to reduce atmospheric CO₂, but also profitably supplying it to...
info_outlineIn this episode we’re taking you on a journey to some of the most remote corners of West Africa, where energy access is scarce, and innovation is changing lives.
Our guest is Nicole Poindexter, the founder and CEO of Energicity, a company that's bringing clean, reliable solar power to off-grid communities in countries like Sierra Leone, Benin, and Liberia. Nicole and her team are doing something extraordinary: building solar mini-grids that provide electricity to tens of thousands of people who otherwise rely on polluting and expensive energy sources—or have no power at all. And, impressively, Energicity is doing all of this while making a profit, already being an EBITDA-positive company.
In our conversation, Nicole shares how she transitioned from a background in finance—after an Ivy League education—to founding Energicity in 2015, driven by her vision to end energy poverty. We dive into how solar mini-grids are more than just a source of light—they’re catalysts for economic growth, education, and health improvements in communities that have often been ignored. Nicole also talks candidly about the challenges of working in rural Africa, from financing to infrastructure to cultural dynamics, and how she tackles these head-on.
One part of this conversation that resonated with me and I think will with a lot of founders is when Nicole says she takes to heart the saying: “Those who know how work for those who know why.” So many people see a problem, and because they don’t know how to solve it, they don’t act. Nicole makes it clear that if you surround yourself with smart people of whom you can ask many questions, combining those who know how with those who know why can really lead to transformational results.
So, if you’re ready to get inspired by a trailblazer who’s proving that business can indeed be a force for good, stay tuned for this enlightening conversation with Nicole Poindexter.
Discussed in this episode
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Nicole was employed at Opower when it IPOed.
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TechCrunch on Energicity’s work.
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Energicity has raised $10 million so far, and is seeking to raise another $30 million.
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Nicole recommends reading Atomic Habits and Dare to Lead.
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She also recommends checking out Entrepreneurs for Impact.
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Our past episode with African clean energy startup I-G3N.
More about Nicole Poindexter
From starting her career as investment banker, Nicole Poindexter has had a variety of leadership roles in finance, government, and business. Prior to her founding Energicity Corp, she was an early employee at OPower prior to its successful IPO and subsequent sale to Oracle, founding and growing the business development team. In that role, she brought together the skills of an operator and software product development with sensitivity to energy customer needs delivering USD 10’s of millions in revenue for the company. She was inspired to start Energicity Corp both due to her deep seated commitment to developing renewable sources of energy and also her passionate desire to create economic opportunity for some of the world’s poorest people through energy access.