Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:47 · Alexa von Tobel, Alexa von Tobel
[00:00:47] S1: Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. What if climate action wasn't just good for the planet, but actually really good for business? Taylor Francis is the founder and CEO of Watershed, the leading enterprise sustainability platform that is now valued at $1,800,000,000. Watershed helps some of the world's biggest companies, FedEx, Walmart, Airbnb, measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions. Collectively, their customers are responsible for 5% of global carbon emissions, which goes to show the massive and meaningful impact Watershed has. My husband, Cliff Ryan, invested in Watershed series b back in 2022 and has always been impressed with Taylor. After meeting him, I was too. I'm thrilled to finally have him on. In this conversation, we'll talk about how he built Watershed, why AI is transforming, how companies tackle their supply chains, and why he believes we're living through the biggest transformation in climate in thirty years. Let's dive right in. If you're running a startup, [00:01:36] S2: we know things like managing equity and communicating with investors are always top of mind. [00:01:41] S1: Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com.
00:01:41 · Alexa von Tobel, Alexa von Tobel
[00:01:41] S1: Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com. [00:01:56] S2: And with that, let's welcome Taylor. Taylor, first of all, I'm so happy to get to spend time with you. I know we've spent some time in person. Thank you so much, and I am so excited to dive into everything that you're building on a topic I obviously care deeply about. I wanna go back to the beginning, your origin story, and you grew up in the Bay Area. Your dad worked in venture. How did you think about being around the startup ecosystem, the investing world? How did that shape you? And I always like to just ask a simple question. If we go back to the beginning of you when you were five, 10, etcetera, is it an obvious straight line that you ended up right where you are today?
00:02:34 · Taylor Francis, Alexa von Tobel
[00:02:34] S0: Well, Alexa, thanks for having me. This is a total treat, and I'm glad to be here. I was lucky to grow up in California. I think the most important part of my childhood was actually that I grew up in a family that spent a lot of time outside. For me, growing up in California was about the fact that for our August summer vacations, we would get in the car, we'd drive through Yosemite, up and over the Sierras to Mammoth, and we'd spend summer break every year doing a backpacking trip in the High Sierra, starting near Mammoth or starting near Bishop or Bridgeport or all these amazing towns on the East Side Of The Sierra. And we'd spend eight days as a family out in the woods carrying everything on our back and catching fish and filtering water and playing card games. So I think the thing that feels maybe unsurprising to me is to draw a line from a childhood in the outdoors to a career spent thinking about the planet and climate and the environment and conservation and the natural world. Ultimately, that's... Yeah. I think that's the thing that motivated me from an early age. [00:03:48] S2: When you were 12, you saw An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. I remember seeing that movie myself too. And it clearly hit you hard. I think you described it as leaving the theater feeling energized and angry. Say more.
00:04:01 · Taylor Francis
[00:04:01] S0: Yeah. It was summer. I saw the movie with my mom. I was 12 or 13 years old. I was pretty pissed off. You know, this was a movie about how the generation before was gonna leave my generation with a very different world. And I loved to ski. I was thinking about snowpack in California in winter. But beyond that, it just seemed like we were gonna be left with a totally different world. And I found it energizing in the sense of, Okay, this feels like it could be a generational cause, a bit of a generational call to arms on... We have just barely enough time to try to change that future. And so I went home, and I tried to get in touch with Al office, and it turned out that they were training a couple 100 people to be the first class of this experiment, which was an experiment. And can we train people to give the slideshow that Al Gore presented in the movie at rotary clubs, schools, and libraries, and teacher associations, and the places where communities actually gather? And I was part of that first cohort, and I ended up spending all of high school going around, mostly speaking at other schools. I figured out if I could do a school assembly, talk to a thousand students, they'd go home and talk to their parents. That was my theory of change. And so yeah, that movie was the beginning for me of feeling like climate is this generational call to arms that I want to spend time working on.
00:05:34 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:05:34] S2: I love that. So let's fast forward. You then went to study public and international affairs at Princeton, and later led the entrepreneurship club. So clearly this is not an accident. At that point, were you thinking that you wanted a future on policy? Was it clear you wanted to go build something? Where was your head then?
00:05:56 · Taylor Francis
[00:05:56] S0: Yeah, I went to Princeton because I wanted to study policy and work probably in DC, and that was the obvious path for me on climate problems seems like a policy problem, figure out a set of policy tools to solve it. Interesting thing that happened when I was in college was Obama had been elected president. We had a Democratic House. We had a Democratic Senate. It seemed like if we were ever gonna have climate policy passed in The US, that was gonna be the time. And yet the cap and trade bill, which was what the whole environmental movement had invested in, this is the tool to solve climate change, failed amidst Democratic president, Democratic house, Democratic senate. I remember that being kind of a destabilizing fact for me in terms of what is it that I want to do. It made me think, hey, maybe this whole tech private sector startup thing that I'd kind of been aware of growing up in California, but honestly not been that involved in because my head was so in climate science policy world. Maybe there's something to the agility, the fact you don't need to ask people's permission, the fact that you can just do things and just build things and start things. And so that pivoted me back to California, and I decided I wanted to work at the best tech company I could possibly find. I found Stripe. I thought the people at Stripe were insanely smart and insanely kind and insanely thoughtful. And I decided I wanna do anything I could do to work at Stripe. If the only job they'd give me would be sweeping the floors, I would take that job with gusto and then work at Stripe after college.