landon32

One interesting idea that I don't see talked about enough is the idea of a "Publicly Owned" search engine. Search engines are utilities with strong "successful to the successful" feedback loops similar to power/water/gas companies. Maybe a government should fund the creation of a really good search engine as a benefit to the public.

One thing to keep in mind is people struggling to make ends meet don't have time to learn and will struggle to find motivation to dedicate themselves to something. For me it was quite easy to be ambitious and learn a lot, because my basic needs were taken care of growing up. Others join the workforce at 16 and their income is important for their family.

most companies in YC have technical founders who build the products still.

Ask the ones who didn't make it big too. All my friends and batch mates who have done it have good things to say!

[not a lawyer but] Also you don't legally need a ToS—It's fine to go without it for a while (especially while you have 0-100 customers)

Working for FAANG might be lame, but you can find some interesting company to work at without a doubt. I just graduated, and my friends from CS are doing everything from engineering at exciting biotech companies, Product management, building their own startups, and of course many at FAANG :)

It's a skillset that opens you up to a lot of possibilities

Treating this more as investing is very promising and maybe something we'd consider. Currently most of these solutions do not generate a profit that could be an ROI for investors on Wren or a similar platform, but some projects will have an ROI and it would be interesting if we (or someone else) could offer an easy way for anyone to invest in profitable ideas that are good for the climate.

Yeah this is pretty interesting. There's some set of activities (getting everyone on renewables, making clean construction/ag/transportation cost effective, political action, etc) that would actually allow someone to be guilt free. It would be way more money than just offsetting the footprint but it could fully cover all externalities....

That's kind of theoretical still, but perhaps we could crack it

That's really interesting. We haven't seriously considered what it would take to be able to live guilt free without changing lifestyle dramatically. It certainly means doing way more than offsetting, but there is a (perhaps distant) future where people can have an amazing standard of living while still helping our planet thrive.

For instance—if you were to get your community on 100% renewable energy, help politicians who care get elected, fund clean manufacturing/construction companies, and maybe do a handful of other things maybe you could live guilt free. We will have to think about this more, I'm glad you phrased it like this.

This is very clever, we might try that. Thanks for sharing!

Wow, I hadn't heard that story before.

One thing that might help is if we publish all of our spending online in a transparent way. There are probably legal/accounting considerations we'd need there but I'd imagine it would be safe to post that after each year.

So far, we have spent less than $200 on marketing and PR, mostly to test Google Ads. We realized pretty quickly google ads weren't effective so we shut them off. Since we're setup as a business we can't afford to lose money on each ton.

This is a great point, you're right. Thank you for that feedback, we can edit that soon.

Happy to hear it. One thing to mention though: We don't think offsetting is a license to live guilt free. We still have to do more! Hopefully the carbon footprint calculator will give you some ideas for how you can cut down your footprint pretty easily—often something as simple as cutting out red meat or using public transit more often can make a big difference. Also, progress from political action will likely be necessary.

That said, we need to pursue all solutions aggressively right now and we obviously think carbon offsets are a key part of the portfolio that will save humanity from climate change :)