landon32

8 ms·

1.
by landon32 4y ago
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&#x2F
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by landon32 6y ago
Good analysis on how to reduce the carbon emissions of cows: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustain... Basically feed them seaweed and try to manage the land in a way that sequesters CO2 on b
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by landon32 6y ago
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 ba
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by landon32 6y ago
One cool company working on this in the UK: https://projectwren.com/projects/regenerative-agroforestry
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by landon32 6y ago
most companies in YC have technical founders who build the products still.
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by landon32 6y ago
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!
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by landon32 7y ago
[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)
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by landon32 7y ago
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, buildin
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by landon32 7y ago
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 ha
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by landon32 7y ago
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
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by landon32 7y ago
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 distan
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by landon32 7y ago
This is very clever, we might try that. Thanks for sharing!
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by landon32 7y ago
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 wou
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by landon32 7y ago
This is a great point, you're right. Thank you for that feedback, we can edit that soon.
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by landon32 7y ago
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 footpr
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by landon32 7y ago
Project Vesta is super exciting! We've seen them on HN a couple times, they're still pretty early but it'd be cool to figure out how we could work together. Thanks for mentioning them again
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by landon32 7y ago
Oh that's a great point. You can absolutely use our carbon calculator and then find another project to support. We want to make a really good carbon calculator that's useful to everyone, not just Wren subscribers. Let us know if y
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by landon32 7y ago
No you're spot on, historically this has been a huge problem. You can make it illegal to log an area, but people will log anyway. What's different about the project we listed is that it uses satellite monitoring and drones to very
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by landon32 7y ago
You're right, we have to be critical of what we're doing because this is such an important challenge for humanity. This is why we're doing it: People who sign up for Wren usually were not previously considering offsetting the
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by landon32 7y ago
Great questions. Monoculture ecosystems are fairly easy to avoid, you just have to plant different types of trees that will thrive. This is easy for the Community Tree Planting project on our site because the farmers are the ones planting t
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by landon32 7y ago
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
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by landon32 7y ago
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'
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by landon32 7y ago
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 t
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by landon32 7y ago
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.
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by landon32 7y ago
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/
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by landon32 7y ago
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 indi
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by landon32 7y ago
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 ca
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by landon32 7y ago
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.
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by landon32 7y ago
We use the email to save your progress, but if you'd like you can just use any fake email
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Launch HN: Wren (YC S19) – Offset Your Carbon Footprint
114 points by landon32 7y ago|119 comments

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