Climate startups recruit tech workers to help scale

Recruiting the next tech climate warriors

Climate tech startups are in growth mode, with record amounts being invested in sectors such as carbon removal. According to Jonathan Strauss, what the industry is missing is talent.

This is where Climate Draft comes in. “We created this pool of amazing people who all raised their hand, picked themselves and said, ‘I care about climate,'” Strauss, its CEO and co-founder, told Protocol.

Today it announces a “blueprint” for tech talent to fight the climate crisis. In some cases, companies are looking for would-be climate warriors as advisors, angel investors, customers, partners or employees.

• Starting today, anyone can create a profile on the Climate Draft website and be visible to member companies.
• These companies sponsoring Climate Draft’s free program include climate technology companies Charm Industrial, Crusoe Energy, Patch, Arcadia and Living Carbon, and VC firms such as Lowercarbon Capital and MCJ Collective. (Chris Sacca of Lowercarbon is an investor in Climate Draft along with his wife Crystal Sacca.)

The organization’s first “draft” last year was a great success. It was a closed draft that matched a roster of invite-only conscripts with fast-growing climate tech startups eager for their expertise.

• Originally, the cohort included 50 conscripts, all senior tech executives with an interest in climate. But it grew fast.
• Strauss said the opening draft expands to a network of about 140 companies, 30 venture capital firms and 200 senior executives from tech giants including Google, Apple and Meta. More than 1,000 potential conscripts ended up on the waiting list.
• The first round resulted in at least a dozen full-time hires and over 800 double opt-in intros. The star-studded draftee list included former Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, who made at least two angel investments in companies he was connected to through the draft.

The climate draft is not yet finished. The group’s next draft, aimed at software developers, will start next month. Anyone with a background in software development can apply to participate.

“It’s amazing how much building and remodeling needs to be done to meet the climate goals we need to meet, even just in the area of ​​carbon removal,” said Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Charm, a bio-oil-based carbon removal company. Charm recruited his head of market development and policy, Nora Cohen Brown, from last year’s draft.

“Things like Climate Draft that help people transition into a brand new industry is really important,” he said.

Read the full story.

— Michelle Ma

Uber offers companies new insights into emissions

The only way to reduce a company’s climate toll is to measure it first. On Monday, Uber rolled out updates that will give the many companies that rely on the ride-hailing giant for employee transportation more tools to do just that.

The Uber for Business dashboard now includes information to help corporate customers “track, report and respond to their global ground transportation impact,” Susan Anderson, the company’s global head of business, exclusively shared with Protocol.

Businesses can track emissions from ground transportation in a new way. When it comes to reducing emissions – and frankly many other endeavors too – knowledge is power. And the 170,000 companies that use Uber for Business will learn a lot.

• The update provides customers with information on how many low-emission trips employees have taken, as well as the company’s total emissions across all trips and the average grams of carbon emissions per mile.
• That means everything from driving to and from events to business trips is now available to Uber for Business users.
• Ground transportation represents an emissions blind spot for much of the corporate world. According to a June survey commissioned by Uber for Business and the Global Business Travel Association, only 28% of corporate travel managers in the U.S. and Canada said they had her company formally tracks “sustainability efforts” related to ground transportation.

The feedback from the test run of the update was good. Salesforce is among the Uber customers who have had access to the platform since early September. Patrick Flynn, global head of sustainability, said the company already plans to use the platform’s insights to encourage its employees to use low-emission Uber options.

• Salesforce links executive compensation to meeting ESG goals like reducing emissions from air travel, and already uses its own internal booking tool to recommend the lowest-emission modes of transportation for trips across state lines, rather than across cities.

This comes as Uber tries to stick to its own ambitious climate targets. Uber has committed to be a zero-emissions driving platform globally by 2040 and to offer EV-only driving in cities across the US, Canada and Europe by 2030.

• Anderson said expanding customers’ use of low-emission driving features is “very much a goal” to offer them information about their emissions.
• In recent years, Uber has begun to expand its range of zero- and low-emission offerings, from Uber Green (rides in electric vehicles and hybrids) to Comfort Electric (premium electric vehicles like Teslas and Polestars), although city access to city ​​is still very different.

It’s still a bumpy road to becoming a zero-emission ride-hailing company. But Uber for Business’ new tools offer at least a way for companies that rely on the service to reduce their emissions. Provided, of course, that they use it.

Read the full story.

— Lisa Martine Jenkins

A MESSAGE FROM ACCENTURE

Today’s inflationary crisis is driving up the cost of commodities, food and energy to levels not seen in decades. Businesses need to be leaders right now, and the fastest way to do so is through energy efficiency – aligning with climate commitments while delivering immediate returns and relieving pressure on citizens and consumers everywhere.

Learn more

Soon

UNGA 2022 and the Klima-Tech forecast: Protocol Climate Editor Brian Kahn will host a panel featuring climate policy leaders, experts and technical executives to summarize the biggest developments at UNGA 2022 and provide an outlook on the trends and events shaping the future of climate technology and the planet will. Answer here.

A big number: 43%

Tech companies have a new incentive to take their climate plans seriously (aside from all the “climate not frying”). According to data from Morning Consult, around 43% of tech workers say a company’s environmental impact is a “very important” factor when considering a new job. This is significantly higher than the 30% of the general public who said the same thing, suggesting that techs are more sensitive to a company’s environmental impact – and possibly suggesting that emissions reductions by the tech industry could also serve as a recruitment tactic.

Only work-life balance revealed a larger gap between the proportion of tech workers who said it is “very important” when considering a new job (72%) versus the general population (58%). ). The survey defined tech workers as those who work as developers, software engineers, database administrators, and project managers. There are a few caveats, as with any survey. The sample of tech workers includes 131 people, which means the results have a large margin of error. And larger swathes of both tech workers and the general public said things like salary, benefits, or company culture are more important than a company’s climate bonafide.

– Lisa Martine Jenkins

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