Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
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.
00:09:53 · Alexa von Tobel, Taylor Francis
[00:09:53] S2: I love that. Where was the origin of the idea? You know, and and what what happened such that you, Taylor, were like, it's time to go? Because you obviously had great people you were working with, a great setup. What made you be like, it's time? [00:10:10] S0: So Christian, Abby, and I all had worked together a bit. We'd actually hiked together a lot, coming back to the outdoors as a bit of a through line. [00:10:20] S2: Love that.
00:10:20 · Alexa von Tobel, Taylor Francis
[00:10:20] S2: Love that. [00:10:21] S0: I think the two ideas for us were, one, is we wanted to work together. And two, we wanted to work together on climate. And those two things were a lot more important than any notion of starting a company. We never had any discussion on, hey, we wanna start a startup. We wanna start a... No, we wanted to work together, and we wanted to work on climate. And the next idea was that 500 megaton goal. Let's work backwards from something that if it goes right, if everything goes right, it could add up to a magnitude of impact that matters. Actually, when we sat down in Christian's guest bedroom in fall of twenty nineteen, we spent two weeks workshopping a different idea every day for what's something we could work on that would add up to 500 megatons of climate impact. And we thought about hardcore science projects, carbon removal. We thought about political campaigns. What's an advocacy investment that we could make that could move the needle on policy? We thought about consumer ideas. Is there some sort of strava for climate that helps you make the right personal climate choices? One of the ideas we workshopped, we called at the time B2B decarbonization. That was the thing on the whiteboard. [00:11:38] S2: The big idea. The perfectly branded idea.