Geoff Chapin started a very cool company in a very hot space.

C-Combinator, which launched last year, tackles at least two major problems at once. Every year, mountains of seaweed amass on Caribbean beaches and slowly rot, creating not only a tourism-alienating stench but also methane gas, which contributes to global warming. The company scoops up the seaweed and turns it into a variety of products that might otherwise be petroleum-based, including emulsifiers and a kind of natural leather.

You might think that a tech company with a sustainable end product that is also actually preventing greenhouse gases from being released into the atmosphere would be catnip to venture capitalists, those highly specialized middlemen, lavishly compensated to invest other people’s money in companies who rave a lot these days about “climate tech.” And you might be right, but Chapin hasn’t pursued the VC path. READ MORE