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In this episode, we will learn more about the main players and needs in the carbon-accounting landscape today, the challenges and opportunities of current carbon-accounting regulations, and how to incentivize businesses to offset their footprint.
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hi everyone it's game from startup base camp welcome to the tech for climate podcast during the show you will have
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the opportunity to meet the best climate tech founders investors and experts from both silicon valley and around the globe
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they will share with you their stories and personal journeys into this growing and exciting industry
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giving you some insight into the ecosystems that help you to take part in the fight against climate change and
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benefit from the opportunities it can represent to podcast we divide it in two small
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interviews so in the first part you will get to know our speakers their perspectives on the climate crisis and
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how climate tech is changing a game second part of the discussion will be for members of our community who will
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learn the speaker's secret source on how to and share with you their unique
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expertise on topics such as fundraising management strategy and so on to help
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you to become a better leader in your field so before we start i would like to
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quickly share what we are doing at startup basecamp to support climate funders in accessing resources and
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gaining visibility with investors they seek our initiatives include a
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membership-based community platform offering access to a dedicated slide group with a growing number of founders
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experts and investors from around the world and a series of exclusive content such
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as interviews weekly job listings events and our quarterly online pitch of night
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opportunity but more than a place where you can learn exchange and grow
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we are building a matchmaking service to facilitate connections between our members
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and top investors and experts in the field and soon alongside with other top
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investors we will be launching a small fund to co-invest in the growth and acceleration of our members
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finally all of this is possible because of your support and donations a small self-funded team and we want you to be
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part of this collective movements against climate change so please share one episode with a
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friend and subscribe to the channels as an added bonus we will plant a tree
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for each of our subscribers each time we reach 1000 new fans or donors
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do not hesitate to connect with me via social media or email geomet startup basecamp thanks a lot for listening i hope to get
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in touch with you soon and now let's go for the show [Music]
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[Applause] hi everyone during this episode of founder series we're sitting down with
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william lupesco co-founder and cto of acclimate acclimate a techstar-backed
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company is a free and easy carbon accounting software solution specifically designed for small and
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medium-sized businesses who want to address their climate footprint but don't have the time to become climate
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experts i was excited to speak with william who has always been passionate about protecting the environment growing up in
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colorado william spent a lot of his time enjoying the outdoors and wanted to do his part to protecting the natural
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environment william began his career as a hydrologist before realizing that environmental engineering was not the
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best way to of protecting the planet after previous experience as a solo founder william co-founded acclimate in
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2021 with the vision to make it easy and affordable for small businesses to achieve carbon neutrality by providing
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an automated carbon footprint calculator and offering high quality carbon offsets
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in this episode we will learn more about the main players and needs in the carbon accounting landscape today the
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challenges and opportunity of current carbon accounting regulations and how to incentivize businesses to offset their
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footprint we will look at the ins and outs of carbon accounting how to find current
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project how to calculate footprints and how to create a platform that's easy to use for customers finally we will look
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at their founder's journey the challenges that they had to overcome at the early days and the next steps
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necessary to achieve their vision we'll conclude the interview with william stott on how we can tackle the
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climate crisis and how you can get involved in the process during the second part of the talk
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william will give a secret source for early stage founders looking to fundraise by giving his tips after
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graduating from techstar sustainability and hopefully increasing your odds of success
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finally he will share how he has managed to maintain a good work-life balance as a busy ceo and what he has learned to
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spend his energy on to re-energize william welcome to the show hi william
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welcome to the tech for climate podcast i'm super happy to have you here with us today i believe it's going to be a great
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opportunity to hear your story and learn more about what you are up to with acclimate so welcome to the show
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thank you so much it's great to be here so before we start this is the the first question that we always have give us a
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30 second introduction about acclimate yeah so aquaman is a carbon accounting
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tool um designed for specifically for small businesses um a lot of businesses want to do their
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part to fight climate change but they don't really know where to start or if they do they think it's too expensive so we make it really really easy for any
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business no matter how small to become carbon neutral our algorithms can convert their business data directly
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into a carbon footprint um in a lot of different categories and then we have a really large selection of offsets that
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they can choose when they want to offset their missions and then at the end they'll get a little badge that they can put on their website to show that they
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are carbon neutral and show off that they're doing the right thing so let's start from the top can tell us
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a bit more about your personal story and background what are you passionate about i mean what do you love to do besides
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building acclimate what am what makes you feel inspired or like your best self as i always ask who
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is william yeah um so my background um i had another
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company before this but my background originally is in earth sciences um in civil and environmental engineering
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that's what i did um [Music] my you know what i what i do when i'm
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not at work is i i go outside uh and i try to go outside um as often
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as i can and so i have a really strong passion for the natural environment and so i think that
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drives a lot of what i'm doing here at acclimate a desire to protect the natural environment that i love
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so tell us a bit more about your different work and life experience prior to to launch of the launch of acclimate
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i mean what did you learn along the way that in a way you would not have if you had a
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different journey and that you believe in a way give your edge to start acclimate
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yeah so i spent three years um i live in denver colorado i spent three years
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after graduate school um as an engineer here in denver um
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doing some engineering consulting i was working mostly on water wells uh
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i think still that water is going to be the big defining challenge of the 21st century
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and i really thought that i wanted to make that my solution and or you know make myself a solution to the problem um
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that's why i studied water engineering turns out that being an engineer you're not actually solving uh that problem in
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a meaningful tangible way or at least that was my experience um doing it for three years so
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i quit um six years ago and i started my first company even though i didn't know anything about tech or business
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i was just young enough to be crazy enough to follow my dreams uh
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and i had this idea for a startup that was inspired by my dog and i went out and i did it and that was my first
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company um i did that for five years we raised some money i built a team i taught
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myself how to code i um brought a new product to market um
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you know and learned a lot along the way about business technology et cetera unfortunately that
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new that company got wiped out by covid uh and so i was really lucky to be able to
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find this uh as my new thing with my with my co-founder
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so in all of that uh join thank you for sharing that with us and i think a lot of like you
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know founders and small businesses would also recognize themselves uh in this 2020 wiped out
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uh but what was your driver in a way to jump into the the climate tech industry and i
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think we can call non-climate taxes so i mean this term has been used for a couple of years now before that we're on
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a clean tech so any specific aha moments that you you can recall that uh or that
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you would define as such i don't know if there was one specific
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aha moment i mean you know my co-founder i actually met him six years ago when i was starting my
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first company um and he was starting his and his company that he had before this was um
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a carbon offsets project development company so he's the developer of the largest carbon reforestation project in
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the country and i remember when i first met him he was telling me about what he was doing and i thought it was really
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cool um really interesting you know through my background in earth sciences
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and environmental engineering i definitely spent a lot of time learning about climate change you know
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about a lot of the science behind it um you know in my studies and then in my work in hydrology
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obviously hydrology is really tied to climate change so it's always something i've been really
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interested in and and i was really inspired by the work that my co-founder was doing already six years ago and so
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when he reached out with the opportunity to join aquamate you know and to come join him on this journey um i didn't
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hesitate for a second um to to do this so
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so before we start going into details about acclimate we like to zoom out as we usually do and kind of
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understand like the overall context that uh you're navi navigating so let's try to get another your overview of the what
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we call this you know carbon accounting landscape today i mean who are the main players and how is it organized
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yeah so it's already a very crowded field a lot
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a lot of people have been jumping into this um there are a few really big companies at
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the top really big um startups they're still startups right there's there's no one big
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um you know consolidated public company uh but there's a couple really
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big startups there's a there's a company called persephone that's raised over 100 million dollars there's a company called watershed
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that's been spread out of stripe um there's a few other really big ones
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whose name are escaping me for now oh there's one called sinai um
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most of the companies in this space at least here in the us are focused on big companies and that's great because big
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companies obviously account for the bulk of emissions and we need to do something about them big companies are also driven
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by esg pressures um you know and have some real financial incentives to be
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able to do this and so those you know the other companies in our space have identified that big companies
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are really lucrative business opportunities and are really focused on them uh we
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are very much down market from that and are focused on what in the united states is the vast
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majority of companies um small businesses right so there are over six million businesses in small
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businesses in the united states that employ someone else and that's where we play so that's like zero to about 250
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people uh is who we're targeting and in that space there is much much
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fewer competition um you know yeah other competitors for us because
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everyone it seems is focused on the big guy so we really um
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we really feel like we're the only carbon accounting platform in the united states that's really focused on small
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businesses so before we go to too much into detail about like you know how accident position uh themselves
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regarding the the competition uh what are the challenges and opportunities that you see in the in the
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market uh today in terms of like uh accelerating the adoption of like uh
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carbon accounting um you know solutions and you mentioned uh you know the the
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big uh cooperation uh fortune 500 and so on using uh the the two or three uh main
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uh software solution but what is blocking and maybe more at
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the sme level uh or slowing down that this adoption is because of a need of new
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regulation that really and will enforce uh those companies to uh to look and and
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start to use this kind of uh this kind of solution um or is it because there is not enough
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provider like you or is it uh maybe is it like i don't know what would
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be like uh you know the the the break and and what is slowing down the the market to really accelerate that
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yeah no that's that's a great question so pressure um you know pressure to do this is really
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driven from by two things one is uh from the top down so
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small companies that want to engage with biz companies often have to comply with whatever regulations that they have so
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they are starting to feel the same esg pressures that their larger peers are feeling um or if they're part of a supply chain
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for a larger company the supply chain the larger company might have uh specific rules for companies in the
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supply chain the other pressure is coming bottom up from uh members of what you know we're
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calling the climate generation which is typically millennials and gen z um those of us who grew up hearing about
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climate change knowing that it's a big problem and you know are motivated to do something about it we prefer to shop
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uh or be employed by companies that are conscious about their climate footprint
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um and that you know share our values so those are really the pressures that companies are feeling but you're right
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for now it's still voluntary and so that's a challenge a lot of our
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customers say that they understand the value of what we're doing they think it's important they want to do it but
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just not right now because right now we're focused on other things you know we're still recovering from the pandemic we etc so
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it's hard to get companies to make this a priority regulation would help the problem is regulation right now
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businesses feel like it's an undue burden on them to have to do this accounting because it can take a long time it's very laborious
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and so one of the ways in which we're presenting ourselves is that we would enable regulation right and we've
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already started to see that we can talk about that more but by making it so easy for these companies to do the right
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thing we can enable the regulators to come in and say hey this is something that all businesses should be doing
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um i mean and you mentioned like uh north
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america u.s canada and mainly us where you guys are active but you see any any
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difference uh maybe according to you and based on your own you know knowledge of the of the market do you see any
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difference in terms of like at the uh european versus north american market uh
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in terms of like i mean i guess you know competitors are everywhere but uh is everyone focusing on the into their own
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um i would say country or region of interest or is it something that could go
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more global as a solution and do you see any uh differences uh between the way
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all uh those markets are operating uh outside of the us or versus the us and
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north america yeah so admittedly i'm certainly not an expert on um
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you know the markets that are not the us because that's not where we're focused right now but um our plan is to take our company um you
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know international at some point right now it would be tough because a lot of the data that we have is really tailored
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for the u.s markets right so we have a lot of data from the epa and the american the energy information association and
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sort of other u.s centric agencies we'd have to go out and collect that data for every country
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or for every other you know market so maybe there's a big um sort of centralized data repository
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for europe that's not something we've looked into yet i know that europe is much much further ahead
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and another possible complexity for this is the fact that
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europe has different reporting requirements than what we have in the us and so we would have to be able to build
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out um you know new reporting features but those are all fairly minor things i think in general this is a universal
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application nobody we're not going to be able to solve climate change unless every company on the planet
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is able to start doing this and uh a lot of the core functionality of what we're
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doing of you know how we account for carbon really is universally applicable um
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and um yeah we all need to be in this together so definitely and we'll cover a little bit
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later in the interview like the way all you guys calculate carbon footprint but uh speaking about data uh you mentioned
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that here like uh you have access now with thanks to the you know the different customers that are on your
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platform so you can kind of like uh i guess um slowly able to step back and
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understand uh the different areas where the carbon footprint for companies uh
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for the different companies are the the most heavy uh do you see any like trends
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uh in terms of like the smes uh where are the main uh you know part of uh
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interest or the the area the most difficult in a way to decarbonize
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yeah so our platform still does not do
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all um all sources of emissions for businesses because that's um you know we're a small
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company and there's a lot right so we don't really do yet supply chains or anything tied to lca
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food those kinds of things uh for some small businesses that would be
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by far the biggest driver of their emissions if they are sure and
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we just don't have a lot of good insight into that um a lot of those scope 3 emissions are really really complex
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but what i can tell you from what we do calculate travel is huge uh for small businesses
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um there's also a surprisingly
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large sec um chunk of emissions that can come from commuting a lot of employers might not
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realize that that's part of their scope 3 emissions so we we calculate commuting emissions for businesses
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we also do utilities but that's relatively minor especially now post
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covid when most people are working from home a lot of our companies are working from home travel is by far the biggest the second
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uh also again depending on the company could be shipping uh companies that are shipping a lot of things back and forth
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that can really add up um and then yeah lca but unfortunately
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we don't do lca yeah sorry lca is a life cycle analysis and so it's a way of looking at supply
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chains um and it's very complex and so we haven't figured out yet how to really do that
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so thank you so much so to close this uh this section i mean as everyone knows that there's always like this you know
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controversy around like carbon footprint and offsetting so according to you what is the the
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real impact of those like calculation uh and the the upsetting on
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on climate change and the planet in general uh i mean why do they need to to
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exist uh or is it more like a buzz or green washing you know tool that
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companies in a way can use to look better and attract more talent or customers
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yeah so i you know we certainly don't think of what we're doing as greenwashing um you know the carbon
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offsets that we sell they all have measurable tangible impacts on the climate benefits to the
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climate um and so we think of this as a way for companies to start doing something
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and to quantify the cost of the emissions that they're putting out there
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now for now carbon offsets are really cheap and so
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it is really easy for a company to just say like i'm just going to offset this every month and i don't have to do a
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whole lot about it that's going to change soon carbon offset prices are going to start
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coming up as everyone tries to get their hands on these offsets and at that point
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you know if you want to be carbon neutral and you want to do it just with offsets that's going to start costing a lot of
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money and so we see this really as an incentive for companies to start actually making meaningful reductions
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because offsets are definitely not the only solution they're a first start really what we need to do is start reducing emissions offsets is a way
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to help companies be incentivized to start making meaningful additions if they
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can't put a you know quantifiable cost to the emissions that they're producing they don't really have any reason to
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start reducing them so it's quite important to uh acclimate now i mean what is the story behind it
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and and you know you mentioned already for who it is but uh what what what is that the
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gap that you identify at first that led you to the current version of vaccinates
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i mean why did i clean it had to exist in a way yeah so aquaman really
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um it started out of a company called renew west which was the company started by my co-founder
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um mike smith so he has a passion for climate change and he
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has a long personal story he was in the navy for a long time but then he took a hard turn out of the navy because he
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wanted to fight climate change um because he had seen this forest fire when he grew up as a kid in idaho and
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wanted to do something about it so mike spent
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six years growing uh renew west and in the process developing the largest
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carbon reforestation project in the country and eventually he was joined by his co-founder john cleland and the two
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of them did that for several years together but they realized that um planting trees
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and doing carbon offsets work isn't going to matter a whole lot if all the
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trees burn down and you know everything burns down anyways so the realization was that this needed to
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scale a lot faster uh and we needed to get a lot more businesses
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in on trying to do this uh but they didn't have the means to do that so
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that's when they brought me in uh with my you know background in software development and and building products
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i was invited to join the team to help build some kind of product that would allow us to
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tackle climate change in a much more scalable way we white boarded it out and we identified really that the big
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opportunity was in small businesses because they are underserved nobody is really paying attention to them
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they still have a very significant contribution to emissions um
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but there's no way really for them to do anything about it and so that's how we settled on aquaman we had a whiteboard
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session the three of us two years ago um actually two years ago this week and um
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and um we we've grown out from there and then eventually aquamate
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got to the point where it spun out of renew west and became its own company
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so and i think that's a good segue for my next question like on the product side how does it work if you could like
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work as uh through the user uh experience like um you know for people who are listening
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to the show doesn't have a climate in front of them like orchestra
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yeah absolutely so um there are two key insights that sort of drive the whole product experience one is that all of
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the business that all of the data that businesses need to be carbon neutral is data that they already have
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right it's buried in their financial data their operational data etc so we
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wanted to make it as easy as possible to do this and that means minimizing the amount of data that you need to input to
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be able to figure out your carbon footprint the second is that anyone should be able to know their
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carbon footprint without having to become an expert in carbon and without having to spend a whole lot of time on it small business owners have a lot of
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other things to do if they want to make this a priority it has to be easy so the design standard
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that we're working towards is that you should be able to be carbon neutral in less than five minutes a month
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so when you sign up for acclimate and it's
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free to sign up and free to figure out what your carbon footprint is we're going to guide you through an
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onboarding process and we actually right now offer sort of a concierge onboarding service with one of our team
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and you're going to put in information about your offices about if you have any vehicles about your employees and how
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they commute we actually you can send out a survey link to each of your employees where they can fill in that
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information themselves if you have quickbooks you can link your account directly to
26:20
your quickbooks account we're working on other integrations as we start growing and targeting some
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larger companies and then we have an algorithm that will pull in financial data from businesses
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and convert it into emissions data right because again things that you buy are tied to your missions and and that
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information's there we just need to extract it so we can read that data directly from quickbooks and pull it right into your account and tell you
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what was in the mission and what wasn't if you don't have quickbooks for now you can just upload a csv of your
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transactions and would do the same thing so onboarding is the big step right of just
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getting all that information into the platform and then from there we just track all of your emissions every month
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and we let you know when you need to buy offsets uh you know sort of on a monthly basis to offset all
27:08
of your emissions from that month once once you've made it through onboarding it's actually pretty quick and easy
27:14
to do that every month you can buy it offsets for several months in advance and then we'll keep tracking them
27:19
through that time and let you know when those offsets have expired or when you're you know when you've consumed
27:25
the offsets that you purchased and you need to purchase more so i'd like to go back a little bit
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about the um you know we understand the onboarding process and uh
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i believe it was probably like uh one of the first challenges that you guys had to uh to put together is like
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it's always like this like how do we collect those data organize them in a
27:49
in a simple manner and uh from there we can then uh process uh you know the
27:55
carbon footprint uh calculation so you can tell us a bit more about this carbon footprint calculation uh how does it
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work which framework are you using how do you ensure the accuracy of of in a way the footprint that you show
28:09
to to customers and do you have any like independent reviewer or contributors
28:15
like if you can you know tell us a bit more about it yeah so
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one of the ways in which we keep our product simple to use is that we we allow
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our customers to be more accurate with the calculations that they're doing but we also sort of
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provide uh general base level calculations um
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for companies that just want to get close enough right a lot of these companies they're just doing this because they want to and so
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it's not necessarily important to them that the calculations be as accurate as
28:52
possible they just want to know that they have a number that's pretty close and that they're doing the right
28:59
thing so so we guess a lot uh but when we guess we guess high
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because guessing high just means that they're buying more offsets for the planet so we intentionally guess high and what i mean
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what that we're guessing is that we don't alway we can be very very accurate in our calculations but we
29:18
don't always ask for the information that we need for those calculations right away so for a
29:24
flight for example if we see a flight we're just going to guess where that fight went and and for now
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it's really hard because it's you can't really tie the price of a flight to the distance of a flight so we just guess
29:36
for a round-trip flight across the united states which is longer than most flights
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so our customers can put in more information about that flight to refine
29:47
the estimate if they want to that that requires more work from them but if they don't want to
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then they can just accept that higher value that we've given them and that just means that they're buying more offsets for the planet and so a lot of
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our customers are okay with that model where we do a preliminary guess and then if they want to come in and give us a
30:05
lot more data they can now in terms of how the calculations work uh everything is based off the greenhouse gas protocol
30:13
and we use publicly available data sources to be able to do all those calculations so our data comes from
30:19
sources like the epa the eia which is the energy information administration we also have data from
30:26
defra which is the british epa we have some un data some from like
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directly in the greenhouse gas protocol all of it is publicly available data we have not yet um just because we're still
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a small company we have not yet gone out and done like a third party audit um
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of our calculations but it's something we plan on doing at some point
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so i guess it's one of the the most challenging part of the of the whole business so what keeps you up at night
30:56
right now with uh you know in order to improve the the product and the service
31:02
we are really focused all the time on how to make our product easier for our customers to use because that that seems
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to be the biggest obstacle um is that just you know they're running a
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business they don't have time to do this they they don't have time to make it a priority and so
31:19
if it requires any more time than it needs to they're just not going to do it so
31:25
talking to our customers is very very important to us because we really need to understand
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you know what the roadblocks are and how we can make this uh easier for them um more intuitive
31:39
that's one thing then also data privacy and protection obviously is a big thing we're getting a lot of data from these
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companies we a lot of it is fairly sensitive like financial information
31:49
we really feel an obligation to protect it uh you know and we know that they expect that from us and
31:55
so that's another thing that keeps me personally as the cto up at night is um
32:00
you know we gotta make sure we protect all this data
32:06
so speaking about the selection of the uh off settings project that
32:11
you guys have and propose to your to your customer so like how does it work like how do you select them and how do
32:18
you ensure that they're you know offsetting efficiency i would say in
32:23
terms of you know and long-term viability uh and you know way quality
32:28
um so how do you how do you select all of them and say okay this is a valid one
32:34
that uh all customers should you know use uh are you connecting any uh regular
32:40
reviews as well because as you all know like we all know that the you know the offset
32:45
market it's uh not only about planting trees but uh does it really like remove the co2 that
32:52
companies are paying for so how does it how does it work on your site guys
32:57
yeah so we get our projects from two vendors uh who deliver the projects onto our platform through an api
33:04
uh and so they are mostly responsible for selecting the projects um you know vetting them etc
33:12
and then they provide those projects to us but that doesn't mean we're not still reviewing them so
33:18
the vast majority of the projects we sell um have have verification documents
33:24
available and we provide a link to those verification documents directly from insider platform for people who want to
33:30
read them uh you know so they're verified by usually one of the major four registries
33:36
uh acr cra vera and gold standard
33:42
and it's really important to us to make sure that we do provide access to those verification documents
33:48
small businesses don't necessarily know a lot about offsets and you know they that's part of
33:53
the purpose of acclimate is that they don't have to so for a lot of these companies it's really
34:00
just an emotional buy they buy products that they're interested in and that somehow appeal to them
34:05
so we provide a very wide range of offsets to try to really um
34:11
give our customers the largest selection of offsets and and make sure that they can find something
34:17
that they want for a lot of our customers it's really important to have something that's geographically close to them
34:24
um or to have something that they resonate with right so
34:29
one of our customers bought a project from the state she went to college in because she really just had an emotional
34:35
tie to that place um my co-founder
34:40
you know because of his background in offset project development he's really an expert in carbon offsets and so he reviews all the projects beforehand to
34:48
make sure that they are valid um and um you know that's how we list them
34:53
on our platform and then like i said we offer a broad range of selections so not just geographically
35:00
but also by category so we don't just do forest we also do a lot of methane conversion then we have a lot of weird
35:05
sort of alternative ones like electronics recycling for a while there was like an improved chip hole coatings
35:12
project um but again all the projects that we offer are quantifiable and verified um you
35:18
know and make a meaningful tangible impact on the climate so speaking about the um the economics
35:25
of uh act limits i mean i saw that you guys are and you mentioned that at the beginning of the show you guys are free
35:30
so uh what's the business model i mean uh how does it work who pays the bill uh
35:36
the bills and maybe if you can share with us like you know your future uh projection uh tell
35:42
us a bit more about that yeah absolutely so so our project our product is free and
35:47
that's intentional we think that a carbon footprint is like a credit score you can't do anything about your credit
35:53
if you don't know what your credit score and similarly you can't do anything about your carbon footprint if you don't know what it is so we think it's free
36:00
and we think every business should have the right to know that for free obviously we need to make money so for now we're making money by selling
36:06
offsets and we collect the margin on the offsets that we sell on the platform so if you want to use acclimate
36:12
to just figure out what your carbon footprint is and then not buy offsets we're not going to make any money from
36:17
you but you should buy offsets because that's how you do the right thing for the planet um
36:23
longer term we're rolling out additional revenue sources there's going to be a paid integrations tier where
36:29
you know right now putting in all this data can be fairly manually intensive but we're going to build out integrations with more of the software
36:36
that businesses use and that's something we'll charge for we're also going to roll out something like a concierge service where we can do
36:42
a lot of the work for you um and that's also something that we're going to charge for so
36:48
um there are you know we currently again make money from offsets we're looking at
36:54
other ways to make money but the core principle that your carbon footprint is something that you have a right to know
37:00
and that you should be able to know that from free that for free that that's something that's always going to be a place for us and we're always going to
37:05
have a base product that that's free for businesses to use
37:12
sorry about that i was on mute to make sure there's no background noise uh so
37:17
finally can you kill us a bit more about like the the size of the the market opportunity here i mean uh and how are
37:25
you guys trying to to schedule the operation to uh you know take as much as possible uh you know piece of that of
37:32
that market and what are the the steps to to achieve it uh in terms of your
37:37
your roadmap um what thanks for acclimate yeah so you know we're really targeting
37:44
uh like i said i think earlier on the six million small and medium businesses in the united states that employ someone
37:52
so that's already a fairly large segment right now we are working through channel partners
37:58
we've developed some great partnerships already with some other green business associations or other sustainability
38:04
organizations that already have a large user base that we can tap into
38:10
and we're starting to look at ways of integrating with other services
38:16
that are industry specific so um you know to be able to like serve special
38:21
segments of the industry that are more focused on sustainability things like cannabis or beer
38:28
food a lot of those kinds of companies are really interested in being sustainable and they already use
38:34
software tools to track their supply chain to track their inventory and so we're working on
38:40
integrating with those companies so that we can just get the data right out of that software and you know in some ways
38:46
our customers might not even know that they're inputting the data um you know the carbon footprint is
38:53
quite displayed in the products that they're already using um so those are two of the early
38:58
channels that we're using for now one of the challenges which is both a challenge and an opportunity is that our customers
39:04
can and already have come from anywhere so we've served customers in numerous
39:10
states all across the country and in lots of different industries right we already have duas
39:16
we have an outdoor magazine we have a asbestos restoration company we have some environmental service providers we
39:22
have an e-commerce store right so like this is a very broad and diverse set of
39:27
businesses that's a great opportunity but it also means that businesses can be hard to find and so we're building a strategy
39:34
where you know through doing things like this and a lot more content and seo we're going to make it easy for the businesses that want to do this to come
39:41
find us the other thing is that there's a lot of businesses that are already self-identifying as you know values
39:48
driven these are businesses like b corps public benefit companies or businesses that are part of these green and environmental
39:55
groups you know sustainability business sustainable business councils those kinds of things and so we're going after those
40:01
businesses uh as sort of the low hanging fruit for now all right so
40:07
a question that we we always uh like to ask to uh the different uh
40:12
guests what is your personal you know opinion of the climate crisis i mean what would be your worst for people who
40:18
are afraid of all the terrible you know news and already visible consequences of climate change are we doomed as i always
40:26
ask what do you want to tell them [Music] i think is the largest challenge that
40:31
humanity has ever faced i think there's a lot of psychological barriers that we have as
40:38
humans that make it really hard for us to do something about it it's easy to feel like we're doomed but
40:44
i take a lot of comfort in all the people i know who are
40:50
actively working to do something about it and and to really make a difference you know there's
40:55
a huge community and it's growing every day of people who really care about this and are doing it and i think
41:01
we humans are smart enough and innovative enough to be able to figure this out if we focus on it and so i'm
41:07
i'm heartened to see that more and more people are starting to take it seriously and then they're starting to actually try to do something
41:14
about it instead of just sitting and doom scrolling on their phones okay and thank you so much for sharing
41:20
your uh you know positive uh view of the of the problems uh it's really inspiring
41:26
uh and exciting to see you know many people like you taking the the problem
41:31
uh and turning it into as a a solution or at least an opportunity to create solutions so how can the the you know
41:38
listeners uh founders investors lp's listening to the show can uh can help you
41:45
uh be carbon neutral go to acclimate.com sign up to find out what your footprint is and then buy offsets uh don't just do
41:52
it for us do it for the planet fantastic so any question that i
41:57
did not ask you that i should have for this first part of the interview
42:02
no i i mean i think you know the last thing i would say to follow up on you know your question about are we doomed
42:09
is um it's really important for people to get involved uh not everyone can go work for a climate tech company but
42:15
there are other ways to get involved volunteering giving money taking care of your own personal admissions etc
42:23
[Music] it's really easy to feel hopeless but getting involved and feeling like you're
42:29
doing something is a way to make yourself feel better and to actually you know start making a difference for the
42:34
planet as well so thank you so much uh thank you so much william for your time and uh you know your interesting insight
42:41
on the industry all the hard work that you are putting you know to help
42:46
small businesses to calculate their carbon footprint and uh offsetting them so uh thank you so much very exciting to
42:53
see that and uh and uh following uh with you guys in the in the future thank you thank you
42:58
guillem and thank you for all that you're doing [Music] [Applause]
43:09
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