tedpower

So cool! Chris is a wizard.

Hey HN, we're YC S22 — let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

Thanks Ashwin. And if anyone has questions about working with Stripe BaaS, happy to chat about that as well — it's been great!

Thanks :)

Hi HN, let us know if you have any questions!

haha indeed — but actually, this is kind of the point — purchasing carbon removal credits is just like any other business purchase, but with a negative emissions factor. When you purchase carbon removal credits on Bend, it shows up as just another transaction, but with negative CO2e.

Thanks, ya, fair points — as orgs level-up and get more sophisticated, you might start to use Bend as the first pass, identifying hot-spots, and then doing deeper dives on the specific 'SKUs' that are being purchased.

We treat payroll as zero emissions. The responsibility boundary of a company doesn't include the personal consumption decisions of employees. The spend-based approach makes this pretty straightforward — if the company is buying, those are company emissions. If an individual is buying, those are individual emissions.

Hi! Ya we only use full GHGP inventory data. Honestly, the hardest data to gather is clean transaction data! The Brex API returns relatively clean data. Other banks and financial institutions, via Plaid, often have pretty messy merchant and category info. If I had a magic wand, it's actually the spend data I'd focus on — super clean, itemized transaction data would be amazing.

We picked a price that opens up the addressable market beyond late stage and public companies.

As startups, you have an unfair advantage — it’s much easier to build good carbon habits early, vs. retooling your business after having already invested large amounts of capital in carbon-intensive practices and depreciating assets.

We do offer enterprise pricing for API access for larger customers.

Hey, good questions! You know your stuff.

Re: do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?

> I think the high order bit here is that 99%+ of companies don't measure their emissions at all. This is for a good reason — measuring your emissions historically has been quite labor-intensive. Even for large companies, there is always a 'long tail' of 'Scope 3 goods and services' transactions that are hard to measure. Our goal is to create a scalable solution so that a much larger share of companies are able to participate.

Re: your grocery store example —

> This is a fair point. Our main belief is that realtime, actionable data trumps perfectly attributed data, if perfectly attributed data requires a bottoms-up manual model. The advantage of the spend-based approach is that (1) it's realtime, and (2) it aligns incentives at the company level. The holy grail, however, would be itemized spend data (level 3 data), where you could factor in the emissions of your specific line-items. Unfortunately, that data is nearly impossible to get (yet). Maybe that's Bend 2.0 :)

Re: re-accounting historical emissions —

> Yes! We use the emissions 'factor' that most closely matches the transaction date. So for example, if you bought a Starbucks coffee in 2020, we would use the 2020 Starbucks factor, and if you bought a Starbucks in 2021, we would use the 2021 Starbucks factor. If Starbucks is late to publish their 2022 report, we would recalculate the emissions when the info is updated. For our category fallbacks, we also take currency / region into consideration.

Happy to chat more, either with you or the WRI folks! Thanks for the questions.

Unfortunately 'spend less' is not by itself a viable strategy for most growing companies. Companies need to invest in their growth. But companies can instead shift their spend from higher 'carbon intensity' goods and services to lower carbon intensity goods and services. E.g. if you need to buy a vehicle, buy an electric vehicle. Or if you need to rent office space, rent well-insulated efficient office space. Or if you need cloud hosting, select the greenest cloud and the greenest region. Or if you need to meet with a prospective customer, maybe do it over Zoom vs. getting on a plane. We try to help you prioritize that list of lower-carbon options.