Climate anxiety hit hard in 2021. Wildfires visible from my apartment window. I kept reading IPCC…
T=0: The Decision
Five years at Google. L5. Total comp around $220k. Comfortable in a way that was slowly making me unrecognisable to myself. I was shipping features for a product I had stopped believing in, optimising metrics that measured the wrong things.
Climate anxiety hit hard in 2021. Wildfires visible from my apartment window. I kept reading IPCC reports at 2am while my RSUs vested. A former colleague was building B2B carbon accounting software and needed a technical co-founder. The opportunity cost of not doing it finally exceeded the cost of doing it.
A company with real customers solving a real problem. I do not need to be the next Stripe. I just need to matter.
6 Months Out
I assumed the hardest part would be building the product. It was learning to sell. Engineers make terrible first salespeople and I am proof. We spent three months building features nobody asked for.
“Talk to 100 potential customers before writing a single line of code. Then talk to 100 more.”