# How Pachama uses tech to tackle climate change

**Author:** Diego Saez Gil
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6R-how-pachama-uses-tech-to-tackle-climate-change
**YouTube ID:** 1f2vKWIVB-w

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Diego Saez Gil is the founder of [Pachama](http://www.pachama.com/) (YC W19). Pachama is building a marketplace where
companies can support carbon offset projects.

He talks to Craig Cannon and YC partner Gustaf Alströmer about how Pachama uses technology to help solve climate change.

## Transcript

alright guys welcome to the podcast how's it going to you it's going great so today we have Diego say is Gil of pochamma from the winter 19 batch and Gustav Helstrom err who is a partner at YC so today we're here to talk about Diego's company Gustav why don't you started out sure so I met Diego probably about a year and a half ago now and our paths crossed in sort of like the interest for carbon removal and I've called Finch signs any

more French sort of like area but it certainly crossed in the area of trying to solve climate change to the how you can use technology to solve climate change and it's something that we at YC has spent quite a bit of time on back in about a year ago we released a carbon request for start-up carbon removal quick request to startup which is a way for us to inspire people that work on new companies what to work on and we presented much a bunch of ideas there of things that people can work on Diego has

a very interesting approach to his company and love to hear more but he isn't this is not his first company so maybe before we get into pochamma tell us about your background like you've been founded you funded a couple of different companies in the past maybe what's the journey how you got here today sure thank you and thank you for having me let's see I grew up in Argentina in the north of Argentina always surrounded by nature where I'm from it's you know the Yungas which is the last tip of the

Amazon type of rainforest in the north of Argentina and then I had this big curiosity to travel the world I went to see what was out there Argentina is so far away from everything I travel and see so after finishing school I got a scholarship to do a masters in Barcelona move from Argentina to Barcelona took advantage to travel as a backpacker all across Europe and then that journey led me to New York City to the one internship and there I decided to start a company yeah which was kind

of insane because at the time I was broke I didn't speak good English I didn't know anybody in the US and I had no idea how to start a startup but I did it and the first startup was trying to solve the problem that I had at the time as a backpacker so we built a mobile app to book hostels and bed-and-breakfast and at the beginning was really hard because I had no idea but eventually we raised some capital and eventually we sold the company to a company called student universe that's all discounted flights for students after right after that I went to

Argentina to visit my family and I lost a suitcase on the tree in that led to the next idea which was how can there is no suitcases that you can track and with a friend in New York we decided to you know launch a crowdfunding campaign and started blue smart which is a company with which we applied to Y Combinator and got selected in winter 15 Wow that led me to California and building a Harvard company was a completely new adventure for me really difficult you

have any background Billy Howard before not at all my co-founder told me he had been to China sourcing merchandising but I haven't ever been to China and we move after right after YC we moved to Hong Kong we open an office there and we started you know going to Shenzhen every week this company flew quite high we raise a lot of capital thanks to YC and thanks to the attraction that we were having you know we're selling a lot of our products and you know grew the team

to over 60 people and everything was going great although always with a lot of challenges like every Harvard company up until the Airlines decided to ban lithium-ion batteries because the Samsung phones were getting on fire on airplanes which is something you cannot expect as a start-up to be yeah you know how your products band was both a vision for the company like what we're trying yeah I mean the vision was to use technology to make travel better but there wasn't like this a grand vision to improve the world to be honest were you

the first company to like embed a battery in a suitcase or we were yeah worth we know it's all like standard every single yeah you know other great companies came afterwards you know bringing innovation to lag you know by the way to me the biggest lessons that I got from that startup was that you can introduce a new idea into the world and this idea can spread as a meme and then you have a new category in the planet a conversation in a coffee shop in New York City can turn into a multi hundred million dollar category

and I was like wow okay we have that power why don't we put to good use to solve one of the you know biggest problems that humanity faces today so anyways that company ended up in this you know very difficult situation we were able to sell the assets of the company the technology and the IP but but the company didn't end in a good exit so after that I decided to you know take some time off do a lot of soul-searching went with my two brothers

to the Amazon rainforest spend some time with some Native communities there got incredibly inspired by the power of nature and also God incredibly heartbroken seen deforestation happening there in the border of the Amazon and civilization then move here to the Santa Cruz Mountains where I live now among the redwoods and from there started researching and thinking what I was going to do next and climate change and the environmental crisis was my biggest concern and at the same time I had this

this inspiration by the forest where I had been and I reading a book I discovered or I learned the potential that reforestation and forest conservation has to capture carbon at scale in the planet and is one of the most important solutions to climate change and nobody is talking about at the time this is two years and half ago and so then that led me to research you know how technology could enable that solution and I decided to come back to

the road even though it was you know quite you know still I guess broken by the previous experience but I was like okay everything I learned I need to put it at the service of this which i think is the biggest problem of our generation and then I when I talk to you and you receive me and I drew in whiteboard the idea and you told me this is really good idea go for it and I can tell you what it is now but

that's that's a background of how I got to pochamma so tell us what pajama does I mean there's this a lot of people have ideas of how to solve climate change I believe the technology will be absolute the core of solving it like most big problems of humanity have faced in the past technology have somewhat helped solve yeah so maybe tell me about pochamma what does it do sounds like a good idea to plant trees but like in what way do you do you she asked that so the first question that we

asked was okay if reforestation and forth conservation is such a big solution and such an easy solution we know how to plant trees and why we're not doing it and the answer to that is okay somebody has to pay for that you know we were not driving funding to it there is nothing economic incentive to do it today and the mechanism that was created by the United Nations to create an incentive to drive solutions to climate change is carbon markets carbon

markets work in the following way the companies and organizations that are emitting co2 into the atmosphere should take responsibility for those emissions and should compensate those emissions and the way to do it is through an instrument that was created called carbon credits that are given to projects that reduce emissions or recapture carbon from the atmosphere now that's a market that had some grown you know growth at the beginning and then

after the financial crisis kind of crash but after the Paris agreement the market is growing again and according to the World Bank last year over 80 billion dollars went into carbon market initiatives around the world and yet when you look at the percentage of that funding that is going to forest conservation and restoration is less than 2 percent so the then the question that we ask is okay why does gas and we learned that there were two problems number one if you to certify a fourth project today let's

say that you want to plant trees you have a land and you want to you know do reforestation or do forest conservation you have to do a certification process that takes two years and it cost between a hundred and four hundred thousand dollars because you had to get auditors sent to your field to count trees and measure the size of a trees every certain period of time and that is very inefficient so as a result there aren't that many projects in the u.s. there are less than 50 projects that cost certification for current credits and in South America there is less and you know

the only projects are very large projects in the other hand buyers of carbon offsets in a way stayed away from forests because of a lot of lack of credibility about the projects you know how do I know this one is planting a tree how do I know that the calculations being correct how do I know I'm not gonna get in trouble if there is a problem in the project which flows fraud common it's not common but it happens sometimes and there were people that took advantage of carbon credits because there's such an abstract concept and

there were some problems with projects in which illegal deforestation happened maybe you know not under the awareness or control of the project developers but something that that happened and what problems in the past was it was the problems related to it was hard to track rings or was the problems related to that the system was broken yeah hard to track hard to process that information in real time it's just you know it's like a technology project right right not an intentional problem you know in

the most part so here's where we come with a technological solution to all these problems what we're doing is two things first we are using the latest on remote sensing and artificial intelligence to do our verification and monitoring of how much carbon is there on a forest and how much carbon the forest is going to capture what do you mean by remote sensing remote sensing includes satellite images lidar data and any form of data that can be collected

remotely and then analyzed with algorithms and and then we use machine learning algorithms and I can go later into specifics of how we do it to analyze those data points of a forest and you can be incredibly precise today at estimating carbon storage and in carbon capture by forests so those tools will help facilitate the certification of projects they increase the credibility of the projects they allow for constant

monitoring and they bring whole new transparency and efficiency to the onboarding of new projects and then the second part of what we're doing is we are trying to connect the parts in a more direct way because today companies that want to purchase car analysis they generally have to go to brokers the brokers get their crates from you know a trader the trader maybe from a retailer the retailer from a you know a lot of middlemen along the way and if we are

going to be onboarding these projects and doing these data analysis why don't we connect directly the projects with the buyers so in a way we're building a marketplace as well that allows for companies and organizations that want to offset their carbon emissions to directly access trustworthy carbon credits coming from forest restoration and conservation around the world and your platform allows me to know exactly what forests that I am right where the carbon credits is stored exactly you can enter the platform you can see different projects

around the world that you can see exactly where it's located you can see satellite images that get updated on a frequent basis you can see photos of the forest you can see how everything was tested description of the co-benefits because by the way one important thing about forests is that not only they capture carbon but they are holders of biodiversity wildlife water conservation community impacts you know job generation so it's a very holistic solution to many ecological problems and all that is described on the way that we

display the projects on our platform so so I think one thing that might be interesting to kind of give this a little context is to talk about magnitudes so for an average I mean we don't have to talk about specific customers but like for average company how much land are we talking what are how much carbon are they trying to offset yeah so for so it's a good question because there are many companies that are for the first time valuing you know becoming carbon neutral of setting their emissions and turns out that is not that expensive it turns out that for certain companies for

example service companies for software companies their emissions are mainly the electricity consumption in their offices and their travels of their employees there is an estimation that you know for a company like that is about six tons per employee per year the emission and today you know prices prices of carbon credits range between five and twenty dollars so it's not a lot of money to her little on their ton okay yeah so there after than employee in all of its so like emissions it's 50

bucks or it could be hundred dollars between fifty and a hundred and fifty dollars per employee per year for a service company at that at that price level and how much land is her just for contacts so let's see one hectare of land of full-grown forest contains about 200 tons now you know the the carbon credits get issue in terms of how much additional carbon if forest project captures so that depends there are different type of projects I can explain

but but yeah we have projects that it's interesting the question because we want to start presenting this as you know by offsetting your emissions you are protecting 10 soccer fields of forest yeah right or you know 50 soccer fields of forest and we have in fact we're working on presenting trenches so companies can choose okay they want to participate in this ranch that is kind of set even beyond my our our footprint and focus on the protection they were doing and not just on the carbon

offsetting mmm so we talked a lot about tons of co2 so that's the typically the unit that people are using to measure carbon emissions the world is emitting 35 or 40 Giga tons a year that's an enormous amount can you talk about just like the opportunity of forest thing like how big is there like this opportunity because I there's a venture firm Bill Gates investment from Victorian adventures they say they would only investing things that have a minimum opportunity of I think it's like one Giga ton or one

happen or half percent some some large number which means that everything you have to go after has to be really large how large is the opportunity in forests yeah so there was a paper published recently by a university in Switzerland that did an estimation of the potential for reforestation and the numbers are like this there is about 1 billion hectares in the planet that are available for forest restoration without competing with agriculture in that land you can plant about a trillion trees and

that trillion trees has a potential to draw down about 200 Giga tons of carbon not of co2 of coral so co2 is you know times 3.6 yep that is about 2/3 of the emissions that we put in the atmosphere since Industrial Revolution Wow so we're talking about probably the most meaningful solution and this is discounting not not counting forest restoration a forest conservation which is the standing forest that we had today

especially the rainforests that capture a lot of carbon right in Amazon in Borneo and Congo that we should stop the forest thing right now because these first continued to capture carbon over their entire lifetime so yes these are meaningful numbers and the main problem is missing is that they're the incentives aren't there is it is the incentives aren't that don't exist or they're not available to most of those landowners exactly they're not available because you know the carbon market on

the flow of capital going to carbon markets is growing 50 percent year over year since the Paris agreement and we hope that will continue to grow as more regulations come into place for example all the airlines starting in 2021 will have to offset their emissions this is by regulations right it's called the Corsi a framework yeah and we are talking about about 160 million tonnes per year and that's gonna be demanded by the market so the demand for carbon houses will continue to grow and our intention is to make it easier for

that funding to go to reforestation and forest conservation and in the future other nature waste solutions because beyond forest there is you know what's called blue carbon which is restoring coral reefs and you know kelp forests and mangrove forests in waters there is regenerative agriculture which is another form of land-based carbon capture and and so forth right so the we

hope that in the next few decades hundreds of billions of dollars will go to solving climate change and as we realize the importance of these and the urgency and there will be a need for a platform that transparently efficiently and effectively transfer that capital to the right solutions and and we hope to be that pattern maybe you can drive in on the trust question so so there's a history of people not fully trusting carbon offsets yeah why do you think that happened and so like what is the

difference between a carbon offset and carbon credits and how do you make sure that you build and Trust in your system so that we can change that never narrative yeah I mean the reason people didn't trust them is because lack of transparency and lack of data right it was a very paper trail type of industry and we are trying to change that we're trying to make it a digital asset in which you can trace digitally everything from how a credit was issued how was calculated house monitored and how its

traded that should happen online like every other industry that received you know the internet treatment right kind of like like Airbnb you can go and find every single place around the world and that's in there as a homeowner or land owner I can figure out what the value of my land is on the carbon markets exactly yeah so so the the the the lack of trust was because of lack of transparency and data and information and that's going to change and just a specific question how do you make sure that something is in double

counted I don't make sure the salmon is on your platform and another platform the same time yeah yeah well there are these registries and that registries are in a way cross accountant but there's definitely a need for more transparency tools and more technology tools frankly for these registries to assure that everything is uniquely accounted there is also the issue of the national contributions to the commitments towards the Paris agreement in which a country

can claim the carbon capture for forests and maybe inside of that land that there is a particularly private project that also got carbon credits so you had to assure that that you account for that and again it's just about data and making the data accessible and standardized so one for questions here so what's the difference between beef reforestation effort station and also once a common concern people have about forests caption carbon is that forest eventually die or eventually mmm burn or

whatever natural costs of carbon being readmitted and see the apples Versalles yeah yeah yeah so okay there are four type of forest projects and more probably but there is forest conservation which is you have a standing forest in what you do is you commit not to cut it down that's what's needed in the Amazon rainforest for example right we need to pay people not to cut down the forest because there is an alternative that is cutting down the forest to do cattle ranching or to the world culture and that's an big economic

pressure on the Amazon rainforest secondly there is what's called improved forest management that's very common here in North America these are forest in which timber logging was done and basically a commitment is to do a more regenerative type of harvesting in which you harvest every a couple of decades you replant trees you re enrich the forest and you can continue you know harvesting timber but with a more sustainable practice number three is reforestation and it just planting trees in a place where there

used to be a forest in the past enough for station is to plant trees in a place where there wasn't a forest in the past so you had to prepare the soil it's like basically these certifying or you know silica converting a desert into an place where a forest can exist way more difficult to do and we kind of you know don't need to go there because there's a lot of you know places available for restoration at some point we could you know we have an engineering

capacity to you know do engineering and modify you know environments you know so powerfully as we did with civilization we could you know easily a forest you know for example I know it's a hard I serve Damon Wow so in terms of differences between these methods are there certain benefits to log sustainably for instance like is a new tree giving off more or like capturing more than an old tree it depends on the species it depends on the climate of the region it depends on a lot of things but all growth forests

continue to capture carbon the Borneo Forest has millions of years continues to capture carbon and while a forest like every living ecosystem and organism dies out and regenerates and when a tree dies out yes it releases from carbon the net result is actually carbon capture and there is there is a lot of data that the supports that claim that being said wood is a very sustainable material way more sustainable than concrete or other

materials so we should continue having tree plantations and harvesting for wood generation and I think that doing improved forest management on timber areas is is an important practice in which we are optimizing for both for carbon capture and for a wool production hmm so so to that end a question Gustavo written down sometimes are the incentives misaligned in the sense that farmers just want to create monocultures of crops like hey here I can generate the most lumber with this type of tree

right and yeah do they go for that yeah yeah that's that's been the case definitely in agriculture and in the timber industry and hopefully this creates an incentive not to do that you know in an improve forest management biodiversity is tested as well so and and you know it with data we can like for example with remote sensing data with satellite images we can determine markers of biodiversity that then can be accounted into a system so as a buyer of carbon if I is that a

choice I have to say I do I want to make sure that the forest that I buy to capture carbon is divert is diverse a biodiversity is that it's a choice I make is that it shows that you make on your platform I mean right now the protocols that are elder to issue carbon credits have tests for very diverse it's one of the questions that you have to answer for in the future we hope to you know present proposals for new protocols as something we can talk about in which you know all the available data gets a

counter on the amount of credits that the project gets any biodiversity should have a weight there but also yes buyers can and they do prefer projects that protect wildlife that have biodiversity benefits because is just it's not just about carbon offsetting right got it so you confirm Tomas is a machine-learning in here from passion national like a lending company talk to me how you guys use technology so like like there's a lot of tech and and so

like the the data sources that you get just talk me basic of the platforms yeah absolutely yes Tomas is a machine learning engineer and we're you know building an amazing team on machine learning we have a forest scientists with expertise on machine learning and we just hire a PhD in math that solve an unsolved geometrical problem that you know makes his name on the math world and he's a machine learning engineer as well and what we do is we are using deep learning technique called convolutional neural

networks that basically analyzes lidar data cloud of points of the forest that were collected by urban or by drones or by satellite and in a way it takes account of the shape of a forest and based on that can know how much biomass is there on the forest we train the algorithms with ground truth of plots that were measure by you know for services you

know measuring the trees and then you train the model the model learns to attacked you know giving a certain shape how much carbons there and we demonstrated this is a work of Elias who is the PhD that works with us for four years he was working on this and he demonstrated a New England less than 1.5 percent error at predicting how much carbon is there on a forest comparing piloted had lighter but looking at satellite so you train the model with lighter and then you apply to satellite

should I'm very curious like how do you account for the biodiversity in the model because I understand so if you're mapping like altitudes that's one thing but you know just yeah dead trees tree concentration for example it's a market of biodiversity around where you know where there are many trees concentrate and there is there's more wildlife for example I'm not an expert on that bear you know this is you know some things that I'm picking up so you can train the algorithm also to learn where there is more more biodiversity Amara you know canopy shape also tells you species

group okay so we can determine whether it's conifers or non conifers things like that but ultimately still kind of need a little bit of ground truth you know it's like okay in this type of environment you know these types of trees might be there yeah yeah yeah what are the big technical challenges right now for you guys so I mean data collection we partner with the two largest satellite companies in the world and we're you know sourcing really good imagery from them but we also you know benefit from collecting lidar data that's already out there you know in

ground truth you know again fold field plots measurements so yes we were very hungry for data the more data we have the better the algorithms become we're very excited about a NASA program called Jedi they sent a lidar to the International Space Station and they've been collecting lighter cloud points of force around the planet they're going to be releasing this data now in November we're going to be the first to jump into the data if the data is good we can expand our model to the entire planet

Wow so yeah from from a technical perspective on the verification I'm on it inside is just data but we are a date data is available equally around the world or like that yeah but sometimes it's it's on you know the forest service of a country right here the u.s. Forest Service has been very open sharing data with us we obtain a lot of data from Mexico we're in the process of thin data from Peru and Brazil so yeah got it

so your company is less than a year old mm-hmm you scale up pretty fast where are you today just give us so like roughly an idea how far along you are and sort of like what are the bottlenecks from growing even fastest a common question we ask why's he come face when they're yeah in the Bosch but there's always something that prevents you from growing even faster yeah I mean we did accomplish a lot in just one year at the same time I feel that we should go faster we should be accomplishing more but that's always the sensation I guess for an entrepreneur we we build

this model that works very well in North America and starting to explain to South America we partner with some of the largest forest project developers in these two regions we own boarded over ten forest projects in the US and Brazil into a platform that we analyzed validated and you know listed on our platform we have closed over ten customers and we are in the process of closing some very big companies that are already purchasing current assets and that they loved our approach I cannot

you know say names yet but you know these are very you know recognizable companies that that have a high standard on everything they do so and who generally are the buyers of this like like you mentioned like the compliance markets are 80 80 billion dollars like like I said is this most of the operations or is it countries or individuals who are the buyers countries purchase carbon offsets at scale but it's mainly yeah corporations

corporations that are regulated in this market are energy companies for example transportation companies but then there is a big and growing voluntary market of companies technology companies you know brands that sustainability is a big part of their value proposition and then they decide to take responsibility for their carbon emissions becoming carbon neutral is a thing now yeah and all the sustainability departments on these companies are talking about it maybe talk about like how the volunteer

and the compliance kind of fit together because like I imagine that the more the more volunteer the carbon Assessor is eventually that will lead to the compliance or like yep this is something that we should be doing or or yeah how do corporations think about this is this something like we got to do is now because eventually be compliance we gotta get ready for it or they like this is what our customers or employees are demanding how do you what are the the big the big ones like yeah why are they doing this yeah for example airlines are in the in the case that they are going to be regulated in 2021 and yet many

have started already of setting their emissions and UN offering their customers to upset their trips you know for example Delta and unite to have developed the option to to have set your flight it's not super easy to do it on their website but but but that's the case and then yes here in Silicon Valley you know employees customers and investors are asking companies what are we doing about climate change and of setting your emissions of course first you have to reduce try to use you know

renewal energy and then offset what you cannot reduce so is that what you think the future of the market is it's just going to be companies like making bulk changes versus individuals saying like yeah I'm gonna offset one flight at a time I think it's gonna be everything is gonna be government's regulate the industries is gonna be voluntary companies and it's gonna be consumers as well I do think that consumers will have to vote with their dollars and will have to also take care of we have to all take responsibility for a footprint at the

end of the day companies are just creating products and services that we consumers consume right so yeah yeah make sense so when we talk about fundraising so after we put our request to startup we got lots of people reaching out to YC it was a combination of it was founders that watched our companies not that many of them unfortunately a lot of people wanted to work or these companies it was like dozens of engineering said big companies sterile I wish of the companies you have fun - I will go work for and like we didn't have that many for suffering years at the

time and then there was investors and who wanted to learn many of them and then there was people that from the press and there was like this is the one of the I think that probably the toughest requests for startup they generally the most amount of press interest of anything we ever done still getting it pings about this maybe tell us your experience on the fundraising side so like you and I on fundraise you had funders in the past seen you kind of knew a little about how this went but you're raising money for a company that's fixing climate change it's like what categories are like do they put you

and do you put them the investors and what did you learn about fundraising through the process yeah I was surprised by the fact that this time was my easiest fundraise and I was able to attract the best investors in in my entrepreneurial history and I think the reason was that smart and accomplished investors see that climate change being one of the biggest challenges of

humanity is also one of the biggest opportunities of value creation for society and therefore the opportunity to create valuable companies I think that the the vision that we described resonated with many investors and yeah I mean we we ended up racing almost twice as much as as we wanted to race initially from an amazing group of people our lead investor is Ryan graves the co-founder of uber he who has

experience building a global marketplace we got investment from Chris Sacca who you know funded over at the beginning PG investor and we got you know investments from social capital Global founders capital and even some small checks from you know phones like Excel anatomical and all those investors I I guess saw on us that we have first a strong technological

component on the machine learning verification and then strong network effects on the platform on the marketplace and the potential to scale to be a very large platform provided that humanity awakens to the reality of climate change and we need to act on it so I guess what I learned from that fundraising experience is that there is a lot of interest of investors on climate change startups did you have to educate them about the solutions or like

through the fundraiser or where did they come with a lot of prior prior knowledge no no definitely I mean it had to you know share all this all this information that I didn't have myself you know the beginning of this process how Karen credits work you know what's the potential of forests and so forth but they saw it quickly and I think that so yeah I validated there's a lot of interest many of the investors I talked to keep asking me do you have other companies working on climate change so there is a lot of interest you have to have a business model that is scalable I

think in that sense YC was super useful for us on putting the Silicon Valley playbook lands into this company and avoid us to being trapped into a science project or a non-profit project you know so we're technology startup we had to be scalable we had to be defensible we have to you know be a product that people want make something people want okay so this is funny so it kind of boils down to the exact same things before you you aren't pitching this in any way differently than blue smart sure yeah

exactly yeah yeah I know because I think the I don't know the overwhelming notion is that you have to pitch something differently if you're like trying to save the planet right I had to say something to every investor the internet company I told them before accepting their money look ok now you're convinced that is a good business I want to tell you this is a lot term company is mission-driven always the missions gonna move before profits and he's gonna take time you know we're trying to build you know solve a big

problem so if you're not okay with that don't invest and some people didn't invest but the majority loved that because they saw the commitment that we have and you know really good companies take time and really good companies are mission driven so yeah so so what I mentioned after the request was started from YC we got a lot of Engineers pinging us or like what can I do and there was mostly software engineers I'm curious what advice you have for I'm sure there are lots of people like this

who work in a big tech company their data scientist engineer or designer product manager and they want to work in climate change like what do you typically advise them when you when you meet them I have met many of these people and I struggle sometimes with sort of like what where to point them because the number of software companies isn't that large like yeah yeah I mean the number one thing I advise them is to apply to pochamma but we're you know we're not hiring that many people yet though yeah I mean I agree with you I wish

there were more companies to point people to I do encourage people to start their own companies I encourage people to to look for you know the few startups that are out there and going help and anything that also within big companies you can try to find your place in in in an area that is working on climate change you know big companies like Google and you know Microsoft and Apple all have an area of focus on climate

change so go and work there right and learn there or contribute there and even from governments from nonprofit organizations there's a lot of places in which we can contribute maybe for a question there so let's say I'm a sovereign ear and I wanted to start a company working on this do you have any specific areas that you think software is very needed on right now when it comes to climate change I think that AI plus X there is a lot of opportunities to solve climate change I actually made a list and I'm planning on making write

writing a blog but at some point but just to give you a few examples AI plus optimization of shipments AI plus optimization of travel and air you know air travel a I plus safety of nuclear plants AI plus smart CDs AI plus a smart electric grid AI plus because these are such complex things that humans can't are enough to make decisions er efficient agriculture we should be being

way smarter about how we produce the food that we produce so I think there is a lot of software opportunities on making the use of resources in planet Earth more efficient and so related to researching ideas some potentially starting company yeah you know you don't have like deep domain expertise you know you kind of go excited about this and you want off on your how would you suggest someone begin their own like research process like that or they start reaching out to people where do they go where do they find this information yeah

definitely I think that well the first thing I did differently in this company was I took longer on the research phase and that was super important to be honest I think if in the first company she was okay to just jump into the pool because you know that you know that naivete also helped me get started but I do think that taking about a year to just research and read books and talk to experts and discard ideas is is super important that's what but what happened to me this time and experts are

incredibly open you know to talk with you know people don't want to contribute are you talking like public sector private sector professors versity professors researchers at labs even executives at companies my experience being that people want to you know want to help so so yeah I mean just come out with ideas and go and talk to people and you don't have to be an expert that's the thing about entrepreneurship you just have to be good at attracting you know resources right absolutely

since I have one last question I want to ask on here and so so most startups don't have to spend too much time think about policy and governments they're sort of like there's not really parity for them I'm sure this is something that is important for you because such a lot of this is regulated and policy and got my decisions probably go in your favor in the future and probably more of this not less I'm just what do you what stick what do you hope to see so like in that angle yeah I mean definitely we are acting as if there's not gonna be any change in regulation

and still this is gonna be a big market yet we do think that there should be more regulations that many the big polluters energy companies transportation complex industrial companies should have an obligation to offset their emissions and that's gonna be an incentive for them to transition out of fossil fuels right so yes I'm always paying attention to the different you know initiatives like cap and trade markets or you know carbon tax initiatives in different places around

the world and my opinion is that yes this is what happened with aerosol right and the ozone hole we fix it with regulations and also we fix it with regulations slavery and torture and genocide right so things that are wrong had to have a regulatory framework to fade them out so I do think that free markets are great but at the same time you know the role of you know

regulations on a capitalistic society is to bring society to where everybody wants to go awesome so just a couple quick questions from Twitter before we wrap up sure so Guillermo asks what are some of the most important things you've you've already learned about the problem space since starting the company hmm yeah well I think that we learn a lot about the importance of all the different players that are out there in the market for example there are this you know registries that create standards and

protocols and they are super important because they've been Stine this for many years so we are going and partnering with them trying to make them improve their protocols or put our technologies at the service of their protocols and standards we learn I guess that the importance of education you know frankly this is a market is very confusing you know so I didn't have as part of our strategy to have a content strategy but now I'd realize that content is going to be super

important we need to create more awareness and more clarity and definitely we'll learn a lot about the data part we learn about you know how remote sensing is exponentiating the possibilities of capturing data on ecosystems that's something it gets me really really excited because one vision that we have for pajama is that we can become this kind of like platform for understanding deeply all the ecosystems of the planet and you know this idea the

bug mr. filler had of having an operating manual for spaceship earth imagining a data platform in which you can know down to the genetic composition of you know every organism in a forest in one platform so these are kind of things that we geek out in terms of data and we learn a lot about the possibilities yeah that's super cool I one more question so related I asks can food forest grown to be a permaculture methods be a better way to perform agriculture

yeah for sure I mean agroforestry is a very important practice that I think we need to do more if we are going to feed 10 billion people we need to find more regenerative forms of Agriculture and turns out according to data I read that agriculture inside of forests can actually produce more yield than traditional you know monoculture agriculture so permaculture is another you know practice that you know has enormous potential and these are things

that by the way can also obtain carbon credits so we hope to help also those projects get additional income through that awesome Diego thank you so much for coming thank you so much for having me you
