landon32's comments

2 big reasons: 1) There are a lot of solutions to climate change that we could enact today if they had funding. Project Drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org/) may be of interest—it lists all the solutions to climate change we can enact today. It's quite surprising—we don't need CRT, we just need action today. With electing officials, we think that would be the best solution but it's relatively high risk—if we fail to do it, climate change gets worse. (that said electing officials is still super important, more on why we didn't choose that route in (2))

2) We thought this is something we'd be good at relative to our other options.

It would be really cool to work on CRT or clean energy breakthroughs, but we have no science background and it would be years before we ramped up to start making an impact on those technologies.

For policy, we think we can be good active members of our communities and vote etc, but we could not see ourselves spending all of our time lobbying or campaigning or otherwise pulling levers in the political space.

But what we do love doing is building products. We are content doing this all day, and hope that will allow us to make more and more useful products to reverse climate change.

Ah, sorry "hire talented engineers, invest in marketing, and raise capital." was actually more in reference to the 20% fee.

Although we think impact investors and potentially even VCs can help fund this which is why we haven't become a nonprofit. We are looking at Benefit Corporation as the best legal structure for this, but it will take some time for us to transfer over.

This sort of investment is very cool! I hope to see it becoming more common.

We're focusing on direct offsets because we think long term we'll need a great market for carbon offsets and reduction. We already have too much CO2 in the atmosphere, so everything we can do to literally pull it out is necessary. Clean energy is great but I think we'll need something like carbon offsets/reduction in addition to it.

This is a great question. To be completely transparent, we are considering a flat fee because of the reason you stated.

We originally chose a percent fee because it was an industry standard model that many in the carbon offset space expect. However, we're learning that industry standard here does not mean it's the best possible option.

The big reason why a % fee is good is because for small donations (e.g. 25% of someone's footprint) it makes more sense to scale it. A $4 transaction cost on a $2 impact to the project is crazy.

The tricky thing about our cost structure is that currently we do not have enough revenue to cover our overhead expenses, so even if we're ignoring the per transaction cost we need to find a way to cover our overhead (e.g. a place for us to live so we can hack on this all day)

For carbon offsets, it is pretty different depending on the type of project. We do not invent these methodologies, we use methodologies from groups like Verra Carbon Standard (https://verra.org/project/vcs-program/methodologies/methodol...). https://projectwren.com/methodologies has more information about how we specifically choose projects.

It can be pretty down in the weeds to calculate the emissions from these projects and since it varies by type I can't summarize it all here. However if you have more specific questions I'd be happy to answer.

Re: carbon footprints, it's a little simpler. We use data + research from Berkeley's cool climate lab (https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/publications) The main model is maintained by them, and is based on linear regression from a bunch of lifestyle variables that you input into the calculator. Our version is slightly different because we base it on country instead of zip code, so we scale most input variables by the country's per capita emissions to get a good estimate.

We love Pachama! They have been helpful in shaping our understanding of the space and some of the big challenges with forest carbon projects. They are not a competitor though, they mostly work with bigger companies where as we focus on individuals.

Your footprint should be available on that page—you should be able to see your annual total, your breakdowns by category, and how that compares to global averages. The "Email me my footprint" button just sends you a link so you can save it. I could see how you may want to change the email you entered once you get there though. We should add that!

Thanks for pointing that out

Great idea! We're actually piloting that right now. I think it would be promising especially since companies ask employees to travel and have otherwise larger footprints from work.

We use the email to save your progress, but if you'd like you can just use any fake email

Side note: I just launched a web app for offsetting the emissions you havent been able to reduce— I’d love to hear what you think of it projectwren.com

Email is in profile if you have feedback, the goal is to get more people involved with reversing climate change

u.s. west: all our cloud compute is inaccessible rn.... our API is down, can't ssh into the servers, and also can't see them on the dashboard.

The first link you posted an article from over 25 years ago from an organization that denies human caused climate change and prioritizes science that makes their donors happy. I would take it with a grain of salt.

It's hard to argue that they have not made some of the most important inventions of the past 100 years: - A personal computer that people could afford (Apple II) - Nice GUIs, window based operating system, etc for the masses (Macintosh) - Best designed MP3 player (iPod) - the first smartphone that people liked (iPhone)

Yes, a lot of these were inspired by prior work but iPhone still brought critical (often 10x) advances to each one—lowering the cost of the Apple II, designing a touch screen interface that worked, etc.

For sure agree with this—letting your employees get a (very small) windfall themselves might make it easier for them to justify hard work and (potentially) lower pay. It also just shows you really care about your employees.

If you're working on a really hot research topic, you can come back to industry with a much better resumé + probably pay check. I know for ML research if you want to ever 'make it big' you basically need to do a phd at a top university.

I would look into the specific field you're doing a research project and then see if that field looks promising ~3-5 years out. For instance, if Coinbase and Ethereum are huge in 3 years, I'd imagine they'd love to talk if you've done important foundational work on blockchain related tech. AWS also released their quantum ledger DB suggesting they're interested in blockchain-related ideas.

It probably wouldn't make the most sense to just go back to being a web developer at randomTechcorp after this, but you could have potentially even more interesting opportunities.

Keep in mind some founders have had careers before starting a company (average age of YC founders is like early 30s?) so they might have 10 years experience leading teams + some significant victories that came from their startup.

If someone fresh out of college just worked 5 years on their startup and then abandoned ship they probably wouldn't get a very impressive role unless their startup was a crazy fast success though.

I believe he was 1 of 4 co-founders, and then raised 11 (according to crunch base) financing rounds. If you get diluted even a very reasonable amount 11 times, you won't end up with a large percentage of the company.

Basically if a company is successful they'll probably raise many rounds and then end up with their founder/ceo only having a small portion of equity. At this point, the founder/ceo might be rich and has "made it" so could easily leave and be happy, but investors may want them to stick around. One way to get them to stick around might be to compensate them with even more stock.

Obviously depends on the situation, but it seems silly to lose a founder/ceo because investors didn't want to dilute their equity and give the founder/ceo a little more.

Yes but present and accessible is a low bar. For most companies you have to email support to make this happen.

I use pipenv for this. I found it sometimes annoying but generally sufficient. Pyenv and pip both seemed too weak or complex. Pipenv was just simple. I would only write code within my pipenv environment, and then when I deployed the code pipenv would handle package management safely.

Never did anything huge with it though. Just small web apps hosted on pythonanywhere.

This is a great process for becoming a nice-cashflow side project, but I doubt there's enough people searching for linux commands for this to ever be huge.

Not saying this isn't a great idea, just saying that it's wise to hedge expectations and not expect this to be a get rich quick scheme.

I think if you wanted to turn it into a larger business, the next step would be to determine an adjacent niche that your readers would also like. E.g. maybe a lot of software engineers at tech companies read linux-commands-examples.com, so you could sell them "new hire 1-sheets" for basic linux commands or something. Could help to get more in depth analytics on who's using your product there.