Robert Downey Jr. Used a Las Vegas Stage to Launch the FootPrint Coalition, Then Built a Climate-Tech Fund
LAS VEGAS — Robert Downey Jr. walked onstage at Amazon’s Re:MARS conference in June 2019 still wearing the Tony Stark joke, then spent the keynote trying to retire it. Between robotics and nanotechnology, he said, «we could clean up the planet significantly, if not totally, in 10 years.» He called the new vehicle the Footprint Coalition. The website went live as he left the stage: a newsletter form and not much else.
«God I love experts. They’re like Wikipedia with character defects,» he said, after a round-table of them had briefed him. Matt Damon did a cameo. Amazon Alexa did another. Downey admitted he is «a one-man carbon footprint nightmare colossus» and that he carries «this quiet sense of crisis.» He did not explain the engineering. He said even a small dent would be the most important thing he had ever done.
The Coalition did not stay a punchline. On January 27, 2021, at a World Economic Forum Davos Agenda panel, Downey unveiled FootPrint Coalition Ventures — rolling AngelList funds that let accredited fans co-invest with him in climate-tech startups. He framed it as a rejection of the idea that a handful of mega-corporations would solve what he called a global existential threat.
The operation split into three arms: a venture shop, a media shop that turns environmental science into watchable video, and the FootPrint Coalition Science Engine, which seeds non-traditional researchers. Portfolio companies have included biodegradable-polymer maker RWDC Industries, insect-protein firm Ÿnsect, and Source, which pulls drinking water from air. The storytelling side grew from the Coalition’s «Downstream» channel, co-hosted with managing director Rachel Kropa, into Downey’s Dream Cars, a series about converting his classic-car collection to electric, hybrid, and biodiesel.
Downey and his wife Susan had already produced an eight-episode YouTube docu-series on AI. He still talks about artificial intelligence as the tool that gives him hope and the environment as the thing that keeps him up. The off-hand Iron Man line in Las Vegas — clean the planet in ten years — did not hit the calendar. It did become one of the more durable celebrity-led climate-tech platforms in the industry.
Site: footprintcoalition.com. Related from The AEGIS Alliance: the country that banned orca and dolphin breeding, and our report on the 2018 YouTube outage.
Featured Image Credit: Tony Stark (AP Photo)
