In this episode I speak with Silas Mähner, founder of ErthTech Talent, a recruiting firm focused on placing talent in early-stage climate tech companies. He's also the co-host of the Clean Techies Podcast. Silas brings a unique perspective as a devout Catholic working in climate tech, combining his faith-driven values with entrepreneurial ambition. We discuss:
How his Catholic upbringing in rural Wisconsin shaped his worldview and approach to work as service to others.
His journey from insurance sales to founding his own climate tech recruiting firm, driven by a search for meaningful work beyond financial success.
The challenge of being openly Catholic in a climate tech space often associated with progressive politics and secular worldviews.
Why climate tech founders often fail to learn from history, repeatedly attempting solutions that failed in Clean Tech 1.0.
How to balance human flourishing with environmental stewardship from a Catholic perspective that rejects both unchecked capitalism and anti-human degrowth ideology.
The importance of finding God in nature while avoiding making an idol of environmentalism itself.
David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and how it impacts how you engage with your work?
Silas Mähner: Broadly speaking, I am deeply spiritual. My spirituality is core to who I am and everything that I do. I was raised Catholic, and it wasn't just like, "Oh, I went to Catholic school." It was part of everything that we did as a family. I was really a big fan of catechism classes. I don't know if everybody else says the same thing, but I really enjoyed it. I loved the intellectual stimulation, just learning and understanding something that I didn't get a lot of outside of the faith. I come from a rural background in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, where the topics of discussion weren't usually of that caliber.
I probably went deeper with my spirituality once I moved out of Wisconsin to New York. It was tested by fire when you finally have the allurement of the world. That was when I really went even deeper, doubled down on my faith and understood that I have to make a commitment to it. Not just do it because I was raised in it.
In terms of how it affects my work, I would say that I don't actually often think about my faith per se with respect to climate. I generally try to do a good job for people. I believe that we're given certain skills for ourselves, but the things we do are meant to give back to others and bring them to God. I have a side project called Catholic Founders that casts a more spiritual lens to my work. But broadly speaking with the recruitment side of things, it's just helping people get a good job that can provide for their family and ideally do some good while they're doing that.
David Valerio: Tell me more about your family upbringing. You mentioned coming from a devout Catholic family. What did that look like day to day growing up in rural Wisconsin?
Silas Mähner: I don't know how many people can relate to this. Imagine you go to the north woods of Wisconsin, where there's not a lot of people. We grew up in the middle of the woods. We could technically see our neighbors in the winter when the leaves were off the trees, but really, we were very secluded out there.
There was no town nearby. The closest town was like a 15 minute drive away to get groceries. I was actually homeschooled and I'm the oldest of eight kids. That gives you an idea of the type of chaos I might have been around growing up. As part of my upbringing, I spent a lot of time working with my dad in his cabinetry shop, so I learned woodworking skills and how to deal with customers.
On the faith side of things, we began attending the Latin Mass when I was six years old. We would drive an hour to the church every Sunday. As I got older, I would also go to catechism classes every Wednesday during the school year, and eventually ended up joining the choir so we were there on Thursdays too. We spent a lot of time driving to religious activities.
You could bucket my life into two things: the church community we had, which was very strong in Wausau, Wisconsin, and my family community. My dad comes from a big family. I have 44 first cousins, and most of them were within about two or three miles of where we grew up. I didn't necessarily have friends outside of those circles because I didn't go to public school.
David Valerio: How did you get into climate tech recruiting? Tell me about that path from that rural, family and church-oriented life to New York and climate tech.
Silas Mähner: Admittedly, it wasn't something I dreamed about doing growing up. I started my career in sales. After graduating, I worked in insurance sales for the Knights of Columbus. I enjoyed it. I was like, "Hey, I want to make money. This is gonna make me happy. Once I can make money, it's gonna be awesome."
After about a year of doing that—I was 18 turning 19—I was quite good, but I realized there had to be more to life. I had made more money than 19-year-old me ever imagined I could make, and there was still something missing about the fulfillment of the work. That really set me off on a journey to understand what I wanted out of my career and life, because I knew money wasn't going to be the answer.
Through a series of events, I ended up doing this alternative education program called Discover Praxis. It's like a career boot camp that teaches you basic skills and how to pitch yourself to startups. I saw it as a way to meet a new network of people that was quite different than the two groups I grew up around. I expected it would take me out of Wisconsin, which was my end goal. I wanted to see the world, learn about how other places do things. It was more of a rejection of what I had rather than a pursuit of something else.
Long story short, I did that program starting in August 2019. Later that year, I bumped into somebody who said, "You sound like a sales guy. Do you want a job in recruitment in New York?" I knew nothing about recruitment, but ended up getting an offer and moved to New York on March 2nd, 2020, right before the pandemic struck.
It was in renewables. I didn't have any particular interest in the space. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, people would say things like "wind turbines kill birds" and "solar doesn't work without subsidies." The standard things you hear from more conservative people with data that's out of date. But I thought, "I don't know how I feel about renewables per se, but it doesn't seem to be a bad space to go into." I wanted to get out of Wisconsin and move to New York, so I took the opportunity.
Shortly after getting into the role, my boss told me, "You seem more interested in the tech side of things. I think you should look at this thing called clean tech." That was in the summer of 2020. That's when I started to go deep into it and started planning to build a podcast in the space.
To me, seeing the wide open ocean of opportunity in climate tech—it was called clean tech at the time—really excited me. Up until that point, I had been in search of some type of entrepreneurship vector I could pursue, but I didn't know what it would be. I often had this feeling that everything cool had already been invented. I would look at the era of the Rockefellers and say, "All this cool stuff is done. There's no more opportunity."
But when I understood that you can make materials that capture carbon, that are stronger than regular cement and are the same price to make, I extrapolated what that would mean for everything. If we fundamentally question the science of everything and see how we could make it more sustainable and build it in a better way, I thought, "This is gonna be huge, and I want to be part of it." That's when I made my real commitment to being in climate tech for the foreseeable future.
David Valerio: It sounds you were inspired by the entrepreneurial potential within climate, and not so much the climate problem per se. Tell me about how that shift in consciousness happened.
Silas Mähner: Initially, I was still very skeptical about climate science. I went through my own personal transformation coming from rural Wisconsin to being in a very progressive city in New York. Initially it was mostly the entrepreneurship opportunity.
But over time I started to realize, "Okay, this is real." I started to believe in the science and say climate change is real and has negative implications for people around the world. The way I really got bought into why we should do something about it for its own sake was my faith. Why would we not want to take care of the environment? If Jesus were here, would he be telling us, "Hey, just drill as much as you want and don't worry about the environment"? No, that's not what He would say at all. We don't know exactly what He would say, but He wouldn't encourage us to be bad stewards of the Earth. That's what really hooked me into saying we have to fix things by being good stewards.
David Valerio: When we first met, I was blown away. I thought, “Oh, there's another Catholic in climate!” How have you found being a Catholic in climate overall, and having the faith inform the way you engage with this work?
Silas Mähner: It's a little complicated. Climate is generally considered to be a Democratic issue, a progressive, liberal issue. So I would associate the people in climate as more on the Democratic, liberal side of things. In many cases, my values personally and my spiritual life do not align with that. So I always felt like I had to be quiet about who I was. I thought, "I can't talk about this stuff too much. I won't be pushy about the things I believe from a Catholic perspective. I'm just gonna do the work and try to do my best."
But over time—and part of it might be because I gained confidence in who I am and my capabilities with work, and then started my own business in recruitment—I gained more of a feeling of agency. Also, meeting people like you gave me a feeling that I don't have to agree with everything else that other people say in this space to still be motivated to solve the climate issue.
It's still developing, but with the vibe shift that has happened, it's made me feel like I can be more open about being conservative in some values, but still being like, "Hey, we really gotta do things about fixing the climate."
One thing I would add about being a Catholic in climate is that there's a segment of people in climate who say things we would disagree with as Catholics, such as decelerationism, this idea that we're going backwards in prosperity. I think that fixing the climate problem can never be at the expense of humans. We still need to make sure that people are employed, because I think it's very important that man has work. That's a fundamental through line I have with my involvement in this space.
David Valerio: How has being more open about your faith been received by people in the climate space?
Silas Mähner: I haven't exactly shared it more broadly—I would correct that premise—but I have been more open about it. For the most part, it’s been fine. I've gotten into a few spats on LinkedIn and Twitter here and there about it. But mostly people are like, "Hey, sure, do your thing." I can tell sometimes they're thinking, "Oh, well, clearly we don't agree on these things, so we're not gonna be friends outside of this." But overall it's been a lot better than I thought, and I've met more people who are religiously oriented in the space than I expected.
David Valerio: Tell me about starting your own business. You recently started ErthTech Talent after working for somebody for a few years. What brought you to doing that?
Silas Mähner: I'll try to keep this story short. I knew I wanted to build a business at some point. For the last two years working at my last company, NextWave, I was constantly thinking, "What could I do? What could I start?" I was in the process of getting married, so I was more risk-averse and didn't want to do something really exciting but that didn’t have legs.
I knew that I wanted to do something interesting, but I had to be responsible to my family first. So I decided that I would start a business that I know I can do and make money in which was recruitment. I wasn't going to reinvent the wheel.
It accelerated faster than anticipated. After I moved back to Wisconsin in February 2024, about a month later, things changed with my job. They wanted me to go back to doing renewables, and I was like, "I've built a brand in my podcast and on LinkedIn being super active and interested in this space. I don't want to go backwards." It's nothing against renewables, I just don't find it as interesting as the innovation happening in climate.
I crunched the numbers, and a few of my mentors said, "What are you waiting for? You've got enough money to fund your family even if you make no money for at least nine months, so give it a shot. Put it in God's hands and see how it goes."
That's what I did, and it worked out really well. There was a lot of learning throughout the process. At the beginning it seemed like I'd have deals coming out of my ears, that I would be making so much money. Then there was a doldrum where I thought, "Okay, I've got to work harder. I can't be lazy about it."
This was the key part: when I went on this journey, I related to my past experiences of negative things happening in my life, but God after a while revealed why He gave me those things. I always held the opinion that even if the business did not succeed, I knew it would be a good thing. I knew I'm gonna work hard, put my faith where it belongs, and go to Mass frequently. For a while I was going to daily mass. If I failed, I knew it wasn’t going to be because I didn't work hard enough, it was going to be because God wants me to do something else.
Keep in mind, I actually started the business knowing that my wife was expecting, so there was another added piece to the puzzle. But broadly speaking, it's been great. I really enjoy being able to help people, but being able to do it in a way where I’m not hyper-focused on hitting a particular revenue target. I'm focused on trying to do a really good job for my clients. I work at a heavily discounted rate, so in some ways it’s altruistic.
I've enjoyed it. It's been really awesome learning how to trust in God at every turn, and also being able to have time to spend with my family when they need me.
David Valerio: Tell me about being a father and how that shifted your orientation and view of life.
Silas Mähner: Becoming a father is the best thing ever, as anybody who has become a parent knows. There's a lot I could say. The most impactful thing to me has been a recognition that no matter what we want to achieve in life, God is always there for us, always waiting for us to talk to Him.
This came to me probably three weeks after our daughter was born. We're sitting there with her—she's got a diaper change, she's been fed, she's been burped, and she's still inconsolable late at night when you wish she could be sleeping. She's got everything she needs, but she's still upset. It's the same way we act with God. We've got everything we need. We're constantly upset, constantly asking for more and being discontent with what we have.
It makes me think about the fact that, especially within the US, a lot of Catholics tend to fall into this Americanism heresy of "America's great no matter what." They almost view it as a virtue to be wasteful and do things that aren't exactly green because it's a sign of America. But as Catholics, we have to remember and ground ourselves in the fact that we don't have to consume all of these things. We should focus on our faith first, before our country. Obviously we have a certain duty to our country, but we can never put our country above our faith.
This is similar to the climate topic. Do we really need to consume this much? Why can't we work towards building things in a more sustainable way, recycling things, building a circular economy? There are political arguments to be made, but just from a human perspective and understanding why God has us here—we're not just here to use the Earth like a napkin and throw it away. We're here to nurture it, take care of it, and be more connected to it.
David Valerio: You host the Clean Techies podcast and have put out more than 200 episodes now. Tell me about what inspired you to start it, and what that experience has been like.
Silas Mähner: I'm pretty bullish on podcasting broadly. The origin goes really far back. I preferred podcasting to writing blogs because I struggle to condense my thoughts.
Once I got into recruitment in renewables and understood what was going on in climate, I had the objective of one day building a venture studio in climate. I thought, "How am I gonna do this? I'm just some country bumpkin from nowhere working in recruitment. How am I going to convince people to invest their money with me?" I figured building the podcast would be a way to develop authority in the space over time.
We launched in February 2021. It was just me at the time. Now I've got a co-host, Somil Aggarwal, who really pushes me. We've done a lot better since he joined. I've really enjoyed doing it because as a recruiter, a lot of people don't like you unless they’re looking for a job. They view you as a bit of a parasite. But having a podcast, there are lots of reasons they're willing to talk to you. It's been able to get me into rooms I usually wouldn't have.
I'm a fan of having slightly less polished discussions because it forces people to realize that the person on the other end of the microphone is a real person. There's a willingness among most podcasters to correct things if they get called out on something incorrect. You can have a discussion and really get to the bottom of things.
More broadly, I think there's so much opportunity in podcasts to build niche markets and audiences, then use that audience to build services that could be sold to them. Using media as lead-gen is very underrated.
David Valerio: What have been your key learnings from producing all of those conversations?
Silas Mähner: Probably number one is related to the production of the podcast. Once Somil and I became partners in this venture, it was life-changing because there was another person there to push me. Having somebody who's there to bounce ideas off or say "Hey, that idea sucks" is very helpful. We've grown so much since he joined. When you have a partner, you have somebody you're accountable to, and they push you to improve. How to make better headlines, thumbnails, ask better questions, use fewer filler words.
The second one relates to the content of what I've learned through interviewing people. People do not frequently ask questions of those who have gone before them. I'm a huge fan of the Founders podcast with David Senra and the overall idea of looking at history to understand who has done similar things to what I'm doing so I can avoid their mistakes and focus on what they did well.
I find that in climate, there's a huge lack of this kind of thinking. There are a lot of founders who want to make an impact, but they often forget to ask people who have gone before them by assuming that nobody else has done it before because it's a new area. In reality, there are plenty of people who have gone before you. Even if it's not purely in climate, if you spend just a small percentage of your time identifying that information, you could save yourself a lot of headache.
There are so many companies that have shut down in climate. I'm pretty proud that the majority of our guests are still operating, probably only seven to ten have shut down since being on the show. I really wish people would look to those around them and ask more questions, be willing to be vulnerable. There's a tendency for climate founders to have somewhat of a God complex. "I'm saving the environment." There's so much focus on the pressure they have on their shoulders. They're too proud to ask for help from other people. That's a really big dilemma I didn't realize most people suffer from.
David Valerio: The importance of history is something I'm very attuned to. You can't understand the world without knowing what came before you. Even the evolution of the term climate tech is interesting, you mentioned how when you got into the industry it was clean tech. There was a whole wave of VC-backed startups in the space before this latest wave. Surely talking to those people and learning about their companies' trajectories is super important.
In my field of nature-based carbon markets, the industry has been around for 20 years but most people now have no idea what went on back then. We're spinning our wheels, trying to solve the same problems with the same solutions people have already tried.
Silas Mähner: One hundred percent. I think it's such a shame we don't have a way to solve this issue broadly. Eric Torenberg from Turpentine Media had this point about how can we have a system for knowing where the bodies are buried in any particular industry. This is so relevant to climate because I guarantee you, there were people from Clean Tech 1.0 who know where the bodies are buried. They're actually willing to talk to you about it. People in this space are relatively collaborative.
So many founders are working on the exact same problems that people tried and failed at 10 or 12 years ago. Of course, in some cases the timing is better now. An example is Fortera, they have a greener cement production. They tried to do this years ago under a different company name and the timing wasn't right. Fast forward 14 years with a couple things playing out differently and now they're able to make it work.
The unwillingness to listen to the sages that have gone before us… I find it frustrating because if people really care about climate, they should be willing to be humble and ask for help.
David Valerio: What do you ascribe that to? Is it coming from the software startup philosophy of "move fast and break things" where history doesn't matter? Or is it just a fundamentally human failing?
Silas Mähner: I think it's broadly just a human ignorance thing. When you're young and ambitious, you're often an action-oriented person rather than a thinking person. I can't tell you the times I've decided to share an idea with a friend and I'd never even Googled it to see if somebody else was already doing it. That's the lack of due diligence I've done at times.
I think there's another problem on the hard tech side of things. Most genuine innovation comes from technical people who are working on PhDs in material science. They're passionate about the environment and think, "I'm gonna take this and make it into a real product and be a founder." Depending on the disposition, if you're a technical person who "invented" something, it takes a lot of effort to be willing to say just because I have this thing doesn't mean we can't pivot to another technology.
Recently we had Owen Cadwalader from Travertine on. He talked about how Laura Lammers, their CEO and founder, wasn't wedded to her idea. She had the basic science down, but was willing to adjust as required to solve the problem. Aside from pure ignorance, it's the attachment to one's own invention or ideas.
David Valerio: I want to pivot to another topic. How do you think about the Catholic approach to climate and environmentalism? How do we balance the need to power the global south with the desire to reduce emissions? It's the obvious elephant in the room that people don't really want to address.
Silas Mähner: Fundamentally, we understand as Catholics that God created humans specifically, separate from the animals. Some environmentalists may not like that statement, but we believe we have a special place in all of creation. We don't believe that life on Earth is all there is. We do have to be good stewards of it. As Genesis states, we must subdue the Earth.
Progress is naturally built into us. The reason we want to create things is because when Genesis says we're created in the image and likeness of God, it's not about how we look, it's about our nature. We want to create things. We can create within the sandbox God has given us. Human fallen nature ends up leading to distortions of this drive.
Along with the degrowth mentality, people put out this issue of capitalism. They believe capitalism is the primary issue. Similar to how very hardcore climate people make fixing climate change their religion, I think many conservative people have made capitalism their religion. It's funny being a Catholic in these discussions because people assume you're one way, then you start talking about what you really believe and they're surprised.
Catholics aren't necessarily... Some people say, "I don't understand why the Church is basically socialist" because we want to give our things away to help the poor. We don't mandate it from on high, but we recognize that any capitalistic pursuit that harms mankind is not good. This is the balance we have to strike.
Conservatives, because they see what capitalism has been able to do around the world over the past 150-200 years, make it their religion. They say there can be no restrictions on capitalism. As we know, power and money ends up corrupting people, which is what you get when oil and gas companies are willing to destroy entire villages in Africa just to pump out oil.
The Catholic perspective, similar to how Aristotle would approach things, is that there's always somewhere in the middle. It's never one extreme or the other. We should pursue the good of man. We can aim to eliminate suffering but it shouldn't be the end-all be-all because we accept there's some good in suffering. We should pursue work, since we can't just sit around because we know it's good for man to work and be employed. At the same time, we should not exploit the Earth in a bad way.
It's very challenging because in many ways, the domination of the Earth—having electricity and making an industrial society—has led to the extreme desire to exploit the Earth, to have too much pollution. That's a dilemma. But we should pursue it in a way that treats this as something we were given to steward, not something we own, while recognizing this is not all there is to life. We have to focus on our eternity, but how we live this life is part of that.
David Valerio: The position of Catholics is always interesting when it comes to politics. The Church is not political. We have views, beliefs, our understanding of the world, but it doesn't fall neatly onto the traditional political spectrum. People get confused when you're like, "We love social justice, we believe in supporting and serving the poor"—just look at the Sermon on the Mount. We're called to things that would look "radically Left." But we also have strong views on the family and what we're meant to do here.
It's both/and, as opposed to either/or. That's a paradox for most people. Both the capitalist "keep building material abundance" view and the degrowth "we can't do anything or the world will end" view are utopian visions that don't recognize we are fallen human beings and some amount of suffering is baked in. Even if we enter either of those "utopias," the illness at the heart of being human is still there without God.
Silas Mähner: The last thing I would say is you have to keep in mind the perspective of people who have developed a very deep trust in God that everything will work out. If you genuinely trust that everything's gonna be all right, it's all in God's hands. Yes, there might be suffering, but we have many examples of good things coming out of bad situations.
There's probably a large portion of Catholics who may be concerned about climate change but say, "At the end of the day, I don't believe I can do anything about it, so I'm gonna try to be a good steward. I'm not gonna become an executive of an oil company and destroy villages. But I'm not gonna be too worried about it."
Part of it comes back to the Old Testament. God destroyed the Earth and various peoples for being sinful many times. Maybe some people think the Earth deserves it. I personally don't take that perspective. I think God gives us the opportunity to be good stewards.
There's another thing we didn't talk about. Companies like Cemvita using biology to create things, finding processes in nature that God intentionally created and using that to produce goods. Pursuing a cleaner, more circular economy would actually lead to us understanding or appreciating the beauty of God's creation and His fingerprint on everything.
David Valerio: The vision I'm most inspired by is improving agricultural productivity globally with new technologies and practices that allow us to produce more food on less land, allowing the rest to be rewilded. To bring more of God's creation back to places we've deforested and degraded. Through our subsidiary creation and leveraging of God's gifts, we can steward and regenerate the world and bring creation to transfiguration. That's what we're supposed to do.
That's a positive vision that's not either keeping consuming to make some machine God, or minimizing the human footprint to let creation do its own thing. There's a positive vision for man and nature in harmony that can only fundamentally come through worship of the Trinity, through belief but also action. We're not operating purely by belief alone. We have works to do.
A lot of these problems we're facing are spiritual problems that can only be solved through the change of individual human hearts. That's something each of us is called to do in our day-to-day life. It's much harder work than railing against global capitalism or whatever industry you don't like. It starts from you. You have to change yourself, become holier, share that light with your family. It comes from the microscale interactions you have—you with your wife, me with my wife, our kids, families, communities. If everybody takes that seriously, that's how things are transformed.
Silas Mähner: I can't agree more. The catechism says to pray as if it all relies on God, and work as if it all relies on you. Work hard and pray hard, and let the rest be in God's hands. This laziness of saying "I can't do anything about it" or "I'm too busy"—there's a lot of laziness we have. We need to recognize our agency and the fact that God gives us skills for the benefit of His kingdom, not for our own benefit.
David Valerio: As we wrap up, what does a good life look like for you and how will you attempt to live that life going forward?
Silas Mähner: Ever since hearing Simon Sinek's “Start With Why” speech and when I realized there was more to life than money, I decided it had to be about the journey. I had to understand the things I cared about on a daily or weekly basis and work towards those things. Whatever really mattered to me, I would put time into them every single week so that no matter how life is going, no matter how rich or poor I am or what my employment situation is, I will be happy because I'm pursuing those things.
A good life for me is being able to go to daily Mass with my family, being able to spend time with my family and not having to work all the time, although I do quite enjoy work. Having that balance and being able to come closer to God, making the time every day to spend time with Him in Scripture and trying to be an action-oriented person.
It's doing the things that I know are maybe not extraordinary on the surface, but accepting whatever God has for me and trying to achieve the things He's calling me to, listening to His voice as much as possible. Developing that life of constant unity with God. It's something that feels so elusive to me. I hear how the saints were able to be in unity with God throughout the day and never get mad in traffic. That's what I pursue, and it's really hard, but that's what I want to work towards.
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