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In this episode of The Game of Capital, we sit down with Keith Gillard — serial entrepreneur, former VC at Mitsubishi and BASF, Founding Director of Foresight (Canada's largest clean tech accelerator), and Co-founder & CEO of SUSTAERO, a company turning forest waste into Sustainable Aviation Fuel for major airlines worldwide.

Keith's story is one of a rare few who has seen the startup ecosystem from every angle — as a founder, an investor, and now an operator. In 2020, he became convinced that venture capital was broken and pivoted hard into the lower middle market. Now he's betting everything on a multi-billion dollar clean tech project that doesn't follow the typical VC playbook — and that's exactly why it might work.

We talk about:

✅ What Sustainable Aviation Fuel actually is — and why turning wood waste into jet fuel is more bankable than it sounds

✅ Why Keith thinks venture capital is broken — and what the lower middle market opportunity actually looks like

✅ The project finance playbook: how you fund a billion-dollar facility without a Series A

✅ De-risk, de-risk, de-risk — why "bankable" is the most important word in deep tech

✅ Why European airlines might fly to Toronto just to fill up — and fly home on clean fuel

This isn't a story about a pitch deck and a SAFE note. It's a masterclass in how you build something massive, the hard way — with science, patience, and the right capital stack.