Our Manifesto

We (Max and Miguel) first met in Madrid's Café Comercial in mid 2023, bonding over a love of technology, entrepreneurship and innovations designed to aid the protection and restoration of planet Earth.

We had such a good time in our first coffee that we kept doing it, monthly, until one day Miguel suggested we invite other people to the party, opening up our rendezvous to a broader audience.

From this, Climate Coffee was born. It came in part from a deep love of the subject matter, but also from a frustration at overly structured, stuffy evening events in soulless offices, with endless panels, name tags, warm white wine and stilted conversation.

And in our early events, our thesis was proven correct: that a morning meet-up that was open to all, free to attend, free from structure, and in the welcoming environment of a café just felt different. Our attendees agreed, because they kept coming back.

So we stuck at it, assembling founders, policymakers, investors, operators, students, academics and anyone else curious about the climate space for informal chats in an unstructured environment.

And it turned out other people worldwide wanted to do this too, with our Madrid coffee spreading to ~5 cities in year one across Europe, ~20 in year two adding in Africa and the Americas, before +40 in year three adding in Asia and beyond. By the end of year three we were sending a newsletter to +6,000 people spanning nearly every continent (and major nation) on Earth.

What we've learned through this is that the core principles work, wherever the coffees go: morning events, no structure, no hierarchy, no name tags and no speakers, and that the awkwardness of strangers meeting before work to bond (or vent) over a shared interest is a feature, not a bug.

By forcing this connection, and the friction of walking up to a stranger to say hello, something magic happens that you lose if you over-engineer the event. So we remain committed to all our events following this format, wherever and whenever they happen.

We've also learned that this is an innately non-commercial endeavour. Some things aren't meant to have business models, and so we run Climate Coffee as a not-for-profit. Every now and then we take sponsorship (running things costs money…) but we'll never seek to turn a profit from this, and will always encourage our local city organisers to think the same way.

Every new year still feels like the beginning, and we're so excited to see where it goes.