I definately have never donated to Donald Trump and would never. It would have been easy to google tech for campaigns https://www.techforcampaigns.org/.
I work as a group partner at Y Combinator. Over the last 48 hours I've talked to numerous founders of YC companies who told me they can't make payroll to their employees next week. In many cases they had raised millions of dollars which is currently locked into their SvB accounts. Even if they get access to the insured $250k on Monday that won't last long and in many cases not even cover the payroll they are planning to run. YC wrote this petition with these founders in mind who in good faith trusted that their money would be safe in Silicon Valley Bank.
I have both a Facebook portal and a Sidekick (I work at YC) and I find there to be a huge difference between the UI of the Portal and how I use my Sidekick.
Before YC I worked at Airbnb and before that I worked at Voxer which was a pioneering company in asynchronous voice. A phone call is either on or off. Asynchronous is different and the other side and choose to participate or not. Facebook portal is to video what a phone call is to voice. Sidekick is much more what like Voxer is to voice.
You are right. Design is now a first class citizen thanks to Zain Ali joining YC as designer in December. Lots of more things in the works https://twitter.com/zainali?lang=en
I hope my answer didn't come off as ignorant to the COTAP story - I'm sorry if it did.
Thanks for sharing the backstory on Cool Effect. Their effort on marketing to me also reflect the type of marketing that don't work. After spending 5 years at the growth team of Airbnb I'm more convinced than ever that marketing have to have strong ROI that can be measured. If it does, it's an excellent way of growing something. And because of Google and Facebook's dominance, more and more this is becoming one of the very few ways to go really big. I know Wren isn't spending money on marketing yet but having a foundation where that is possible is a great chance to make a really big impact.
I totally agree that educating the rest of the country and policy etc are the top priorities but at the same time you have millions of individuals who want to take individual action but don't know exactly what to do. Both you and Wren seems like great options for them to be involved.
This is a really good point. The goal of both Wren and COTAP is to have the most impact solving climate change. Having the most impact doesn't have to mean you charge the lowest fee - but it does mean removing the most amount of CO2. If charging a higher fee gives Wren a change to reach millions and get them to pay more where COTAP is still tiny and have one-time donations that is a strong argument for why a different model is needed here
Y Combinator funded https://www.pachama.com/ in the batch of YC. They're building a marketplace of carbon credit to enable exactly this. They're hiring for engineering and operations in San Francisco right now https://angel.co/pachama/jobs
The reason I'm so interested in Direct Air Capture is:
- It's primarily a tech solution which allows for scale. If you build one Machine you can build a million. It won't actually require very much space, it need access to cheap energy and abilities to store/sequester the CO2 captured.
- Technology have the benefit that can be optimized and optimized and optimized to the point where the cost is not very high. The less tech the less changes for optimization
- There is a big risk many countries won't meet their responsibility. Getting wealthy democracies onboard is hard enough. We need a scalable way to solve this that doesn't require everyone to help because they prob won't after all
- Any negative emission solution that requires a large land-mass will create other problems (dealing with land-owners etc).
I agree that political action is incredibly important. Carbon tax, carbon incentives etc. I don't believe we need to change our political system in order to stop climate change. And if we had to that would make it far more difficult to do.
Even if countries implemented carbon tax and carbon incentives like many have it doesn't change that we innovation. Modern cheap verification systems, Marketplace's like Nori.com