EnergyLab Ignite

Ignite is EnergyLab's climate tech accelerator: eight weeks, twenty places, funded by the NSW Government, taking no equity and giving no funding. It runs two evenings a week with mentor sessions alongside. I am the youngest participant they have ever accepted.

How I got in

I applied without a climate idea.

That is worth stating plainly, because it is the unusual part. Most people arrive at an accelerator with a company, or at least a thesis about an industry. I arrived with a track record of building things in other people's industries: quoting software for tradespeople, a supply chain database for modern construction, evaluation harnesses for language models. The pitch was the motion rather than the destination.

They took that bet knowing exactly what it was, which reframed the whole thing for me. I am not there to defend a plan. I am there to find one.

What I am actually looking for

Climate technology is a domain where the problems are physical, the constraints are real, and the people who understand them best are usually not the people building software. That gap is the same one I have worked in before, and it is the one where I am useful.

So the question I am carrying through the program is narrow: where in this industry is there a problem that is genuinely worth solving, that someone would pay to have solved, and that I could actually build? Eight weeks is enough time to answer that honestly, or to find out that the answer is not here yet.

I would rather leave with a real problem and no company than with a company and no problem.