Ten years ago I left Big Tech. I had spent over a decade in Silicon Valley: first at PayPalthen as technical director Facebookand eventually served as CEO of Reddit. Working in Big Tech can be exciting and exhilarating – building products that are seen and used by millions, even billions of people. The challenges you face often exceed the problems faced in most other industries, so tech industry veterans have unique skills and perspectives on big problems.
However, there is one area where the problems are greater than those contemplated by hyperscale technology, and that is climate change on Earth. When it comes to climate, the variables are still too numerous for even our best computers to simulate. The number of stakeholders is literally everyone on the planet – the largest possible TAM or total addressable market. What this really means is that global climate action is ultimately carried out by cultures and communities everywhere, and the ways in which people deal with it are varied and diverse. Even the seemingly simplest solutions hide surprising complexity – it is not only scientific, but also social.
When I began my first, naive attempts to restore a dry forest on a property I had purchased, I set out to learn much more about the land, air, biology, energy, and earth systems than I thought possible would have held. While it was exciting to delve into several new areas of study, one key discipline from my time at Big Tech has proven to be uniquely valuable and a source of consistent and useful insights. That discipline is scalability.
Ready to scale
My years in technology had taught me to think in scale. A social media site or payment platform cannot succeed if it collapses when 10,000 or even 10 million new people decide to sign up. After calculating the carbon impact of restoring a single forest, I became curious about what impact restoring each individual forest would have. I realized that large-scale global reforestation had the potential to have a significant impact on climate change – reducing our atmospheric carbon by 30%. I soon discovered that scientists around the world had completed research that seemed to lead to the same conclusion.
This number becomes even more significant when you consider that carbon removal technologies such as direct airborne carbon capture are far from scalable. From this point on it is still years or even decades away. New technologies almost always have bugs and reliability issues. And we don’t have time to wait. On the other hand, a new seedling begins removing carbon from the air the first day it is planted.
I love new technology as much as anyone. But here’s the most important lesson, the most counterintuitive, and hard-won from working at a hyperscale technology company: To solve a hyperscale problem, always avoid new technologies. It’s best to use older generation, reliable equipment that requires minimal troubleshooting and has the fewest surprises.
That’s why trees are a great solution for sequestering carbon. We know the benefits and risks, and they are available to everyone, not just the wealthiest nations. Anyone can participate, and although there are many unknowns and many missteps, all of these problems can be more easily explored and solved if we start from a basic idea that is easy to understand: a tree.
Forest accelerator
Planting lots of trees sounds easy, but mass reforestation is a completely different kind of project – one that requires a high level of expertise and resources. A major bottleneck is financing. Seeds for dozens of different species need to be collected and prepared. Water must be provided. Teams must be trained and prepared to overcome unique challenges. And because forests are highly interdependent systems, we must solve them all holistically.
In 2022 my company Terraformation launched the Seed-to-Carbon Forest Accelerator, a program based on startup accelerators like Y Combinator. It provides comprehensive support for early-stage forestry teams and makes it easier for investors to access high-quality carbon credits. In over a year, we have launched three cohorts of forestry teams dedicated to reforesting land in some of the world’s most biodiverse and climate-critical areas – and we are soon launching a fourth cohort. We have implemented reforestation projects from conception to registration of carbon projects in approximately 12 to 18 months, which is among the fastest projects of its kind. And there will be more to come.
Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time. Every year the need to take meaningful action becomes more urgent. It is our intention to do work that our grandchildren and their children will be proud of. That’s why at Terraformation, one of our company values reminds us every day why we do this work: “We are ancestors.”
Yishan Wong is the founder and CEO of Terraformationa global reforestation company.
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