A Physicist‑Turned‑VC Says Our Climate Playbook Is Broken—and Entrepreneurs Are the Only Ones Who Can Fix It

Google X founding member Tom Chi says our climate, tech, and economic systems are breaking. His new book shows entrepreneurs how to regain agency in an unstable century.

BY TIM CRINO, SENIOR EDITOR, INC. @TIMCRINO

Tom Chi. Photo: Courtesy subject

Tom Chi is a founding partner of At One Ventures, a VC firm focusing on our relationship with the planet, regenerative industries, and disruptive deep tech. His new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, just published on February 17, and examines the overlapping crises of climate destabilization, technological disruption, economic fragility, and social fragmentation. I asked Chi to tell me more about his work, and why entrepreneurs should read his book.

Why are you the right person to write this book?

I’m a physicist by training and an engineer by practice. I build things that have to work in the real world — hardware, software, and systems that collide with physical reality, rather than abstractions. Over the last few decades, I’ve worked on technologies that materially changed how people live and work, including Microsoft Office, web search, the early social web, and self-driving cars at Waymo.

In building first-of-a-kind systems, I’ve made real mistakes. I’ve seen where the theory stops working, where incentives bend behavior in unexpected ways, and where systems behave nothing like the models predict. Over time, those lessons add up to something useful: a practical boundary between what sounds plausible in abstraction and what’s achievable in practice.

I’ve also spent much of the last decade outside the usual Silicon Valley bubble, living and working extensively in the Global South and in ecological systems under stress. That distance matters. It makes certain assumptions visible that otherwise remain invisible when you’re deeply embedded in a single economic or cultural reality.

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This book comes from seeing recurring failure modes across technology, climate, and economics, and recognizing that the root problem is often not lack of effort or intelligence, but broken framing. I wrote this book because I’ve seen those frames fail up close, and I’ve seen how to make alternatives work.

What problem are you trying to solve with this book?

I’m trying to address a deeper problem than any single crisis. We are facing overlapping breakdowns: climate destabilization, technological disruption, economic fragility, and social fragmentation. And our dominant theories of change are not keeping pace with the scale or speed of what’s unfolding. Many of our systems — climate, markets, media, institutions — are failing because they were designed for stability and incremental change, not for accelerating extremes and feedback loops.

At the same time, our responses are often stuck in narrow lanes: politics that reset every election cycle, science that explains problems without enabling action, and markets that optimize for short-term signals while eroding long-term viability. None of these are sufficient on their own.

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