Cookie dough Friday: Things I'm working on
Not all great things are best fully baked. Here's a bunch of stuff I'm working on. I'd love to hear what you think!
About this post
This is Tenfold's MUSINGS#3. It's should take your 2-3 minutes to read.
AI disclosure
No AI use. All content was written and reviewed by the author.The other day, I baked tahini chocolate chip cookies (read until the end for a recipe). I have to say, the cookie dough was good. Excellent in fact. The baked cookies were also tasty, but not quite as delicious.
Welcome to ‘Cookie dough Friday’, where I share unbaked or half-baked ideas. I'll get started with a short list of things I'm working on or thinking about. I'd love to hear what you think. Drop me a note!
Coming Soon
Trillions. Who cares? This is Editorial#1 about my take on the next decade of sustainable finance. I'll publish this next Monday, 2 February. Here's a little TLDR teaser.
TLDR: The next decade of sustainable finance
People First: We are solving for people and with people.
Awe-inspiring scale: This is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.
Time: The time, more than ever, is now.
Financial materiality: Things won’t scale unless they make financial sense.
Boots on the ground: This is a real-world, physical asset challenge.
Energy: Energy is a great place to power up.
Innovation: Solutions are needed in every corner of the economy.
AI Forward: Frontier technologies can be formidable catalysts.
Mainstreaming: We need mainstream finance to get involved.
Paradigm shift: We have to focus on capital allocation.
Editorials
First principles. Sustainability is about people. Climate science is sound. The energy transition is accelerating. AI will profoundly change how we work. I setup Tenfold to explore innovation at the intersections of AI, finance, energy and climate tech. I want to take a step back to formalize what I mean.
Data, models and solutions. I see three primary ways to create value with the AI revolution: you generate data to train models; you build models that produce intelligence; you find better solutions to existing problems (or new problems to solve). I'd like to reflect on that.
Financed emissions. A while ago I attended a round table and a person from the UNPRI stated that climate finance is operating under a financed emissions regime. That makes sense, but there are practical limitations. I'll explain what I mean and how we can move forward.
Deep-Dives
Next-generation Earth systems modeling. I'm officially obsessed with this. Google, Huawei, Microsoft and NVIDIA have released game-changing forecasts and models and a whole innovation ecosystem is flourishing. Implications and applications are vast. I'll keep digging and share what I find.
High-resolution geospatial analytics. I've spend a lot of time with geospatial analytics and asset-level data. Things are getting interesting from both innovation and project finance standpoints. If you read my next post (‘Trillions. Who cares?’due 2 February), you'll also see I think this is critical to sustainable finance.
Agentic AI in finance. There's a lot of talk about agentic AI. Rightfully so, but there's also a bunch of noise. I'll be digging in to understand where things are moving, what's possible, what's not (yet) and what you should get excited about. And of course, I'll use that to build my own agents.
Applied AI
No slop: Transparency on AI use. I use AI extensively for all sorts of tasks. I find it less useful in my writing, but it may become more valuable over time. I think transparency in the use of AI tools for research or content production is desirable. I will do some research on how best to measure and communicate this.
Podcasting 1.0 on Notebook LM. I love Notebook LM and I love podcasts. I'm not quite setup for podcast production just yet but intend to work in that direction. Notebook LM is a great way to prototype things. I just need to dig a little deeper to optimize my workflow.
Deep-research agent. My most pressing need when it comes to agentic AI is deep research. My experience is this is one of the areas where it can dramatically accelerate and improve the process. I have built a few prototypes in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. They need a little bit of tuning.
Top 10s
‘Tentacles’: 10x10 innovation spaces and startups. A corollary to much of my deep-research is that I produce lists of innovators in a given space. A great way to share that back out is via my 10x10 ‘Tentacles’ matrix. First, I'll probably ask you all what the 10 areas of focus should be. Then we'll dig in.
10 largest adaptation projects. At some point, we will dig deep into climate change adaptation and geo-engineering. A simple way to tease the subject is to look at mega projects. Recently I read about the US Army Corps plan for New York, where I live. It's wild.
10 things I'm reading. I try to read a lot and my reading is changing (thank you Substack). I'll share some information on things I read that I think are worthwhile. It could be blogs, newsletters, scientific papers, books or more. A recent post I really enjoyed is this one.
Musings
A few things about me. I'm setting up this blog to be both substantive and somewhat personal. I don't want it to be too personal either, but you might as well get to know me a little. At least my professional side. I've published something like this in the past. It'll need some updating. For now, check out TenFutures.
Cookie dough Friday: Tenfold's infrastructure. There's a bit of planning happening behind the scenes. From building a content strategy (this is part of it) to figuring out how to engage, to pricing, to building workflow tools. it'll be interesting to share more about that as I progress.
Throwback Tuesday: An essay from 2007. Back when I was studying at Imperial, I wrote an essay for an RSMA competition. It's about how the oil industry's engineering prowess could contribute to climate action. It's almost 20 years old now, but still worth thinking about.
Alright. You made it. Here's a delicious cookie recipe. And if you can, please do take 2 seconds for the poll ;).
Tahini chocolate chip cookies
(credit to Greg and Lucy Malouf - Suqar)
115 g butter
120 ml tahini
200 g sugar
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
150 g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
250 g dark chocolate chips
Mix like you normally would. Bake at 160C for 12-15 minutes-ish. Or eat raw.