Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
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.
00:07:41 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:07:41] S2: While you were at Stripe, you learned a lot from Patrick and John, the founders. One of the things I've admired about Stripe a lot from afar is their simplicity. I feel like Stripe gets simplicity right. Share some of your takeaways from being in that company.
00:07:59 · Taylor Francis
[00:07:59] S0: Yeah. They were amazing founders, and we were lucky that they invested in Watershed. We were lucky that Stripe is a customer of Watershed. We helped start Stripe's climate program, so there's a ton of amazing energy around Stripe's impact on climate and on Watershed. I would say that the biggest thing I learned is that it's actually, in some weird way, easier to solve a hard problem than an easy problem. Stripe was in this space that you could view as building payments software. Yep. Which is not an easy problem, but that's not a world changing problem. And instead, framed their mission as grow the GDP of the internet. Build the software layer for bringing the economy online. And that's a big problem. And by expanding the scope of what they're trying to do, from build an API for payments to grow the GDP of the internet, in a weird way, it actually makes it easier to accomplish the goal, because it's a mission that is big enough and compelling enough that the smartest people, the most tenacious people want to be a part of it. And we thought a lot about that in starting Watershed, in let's be unapologetic about the scope of what we dream of doing. And our version of that was our mission is to accelerate the climate economy, and we want to put a number on it. And that number is we want to help companies reduce or remove 500,000,000 tons of CO2 per year by 2030. And that's actually about 1% of the world's carbon emissions every year by 2030. It's a big, audacious, terrifying goal. And that was the day one idea for Watershed. Before we had a product, before we had a pitch, we had that number because we thought the bigger the goal, you know, actually the easier it's gonna be to pull it off.