TAKK Cap
“I was following the crack cocaine salary trail, wandering around in the commercial wilderness. Until one afternoon, after a day surfing in the Maldives.
A light bulb moment.”
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For ten years, Jim Edmondson had run a highly successful tech company that created and sold cutting edge engineering solutions. Starting with just two employees, he grew the team to 90 in the UK and set up offices in China and the US, but at the end of 2017 he found himself unhappy and lost. He decided to take a leap and leave the company altogether.
For a couple of years, he dabbled in consultancy - teaching people about leadership, business, and how to create profit but nothing was sticking.
It was after a day spent surfing on holiday that Jim started reading Be More Pirate, one of the few books his girlfriend had packed.
“At first I thought, I really don’t want to read someone else’s business book, but I didn’t have much else to do. I got into a hammock and started reading and it was like a lightbulb came on. Everything just connected. Boom.”
In that moment Jim came up with a new idea to try and shake up finance and use market solutions to solve environmental problems. He’s since been on a journey that led him to founding TAKK Cap and TAKK Surf. and entirely changing his outlook on life. The full story of how he arrived at the moment is in How to: Be More Pirate.
In Jim’s view, investing in environmentally focused businesses is common sense since the indicators are that the climate change market is set to explode. Major climate change drivers such as agriculture, energy, construction & manufacturing will be TAKK Cap’s investment focus.
“Oil and gas have 50 years left, and if we burn all that we’re going to be three times over the global UN figures for the total amount of emissions we can burn. We’re going to build New York City 20 times every single month for the next 40 years - the issue is how much water it will use, how will we source sustainable materials? We’ve also looked at transportation and AI models and performance planning; how do we move humans around in a way that saves energy?”
And, TAKK Cap, as a business, is determined to be different.
“Our culture comes first, we have no office, I don’t force anyone to work 9-5, I don’t believe in Victorian ways of working and I don’t think we should shy away from the fact that we should have fun while we’re working. I don’t say I’m going on a business trip, I say I’m going on an adventure.”
TAKK Surf, the sister movement, aims to use the global network of surfers to further the brand’s mission. Surfers are Jim’s pirates - a fringe group with a deep connection with the ocean that’s gradually infiltrated the mainstream. As a life long surfer himself, it’s where he gets his passion from (as detailed in his TedX talk below), he’s even got a degree in surfing!