“My goals were basically to get a trial-by-fire MBA-I got more than what I bargained for there, which was awesome,” Reinhardt says. and aerospace engineering student at MIT, was never quite satisfied with the life of an extremely successful tech executive. “He was like, ‘Is this going to make money? How do we talk to investors?’ The big adult questions,” Volodarksy says.īut Reinhardt, a former math wiz from a lower middle-class family in Pullman, Wash. Reinhardt, almost by default, started running things as CEO. With two months’ worth of cash left to run their servers, they gave their entrepreneurial dreams one last shot and hit on an idea for software to help companies track consumer data, which turned into a very lucrative company called Segment. They redirected their energy to another idea for business analytics software, which also failed. They got off to a brisk start, raising about $800,000 in seed funding. Their original idea was a website that would help instructors see if students were following their lectures in real time. Back in 2011, he and two friends, Ilya Volodarksy and Calvin French-Owen, dropped out of their junior year at MIT to start a software company. Reinhardt, 34, has a classic Silicon Valley story. In the three years since Charm began this process in 2020, the company says it has sequestered about 6,400 tons of carbon, selling the service as carbon offsets. The bio-oil contains a high carbon concentration, which the plants originally pulled out of the atmosphere as they grew, and which would have been released back into the atmosphere had they been left to decompose. Then it heats up the waste until it turns into a slurry in a process called pyrolysis, and pumps the “bio-oil” down into abandoned oil wells, where the company says it will remain for more than 10,000 years. The largest, though, judging by the amount of carbon they’ve managed to sequester, is a San Francisco-based company called Charm Industrial.įounded in 2018, Charm specializes in gathering up leftover corn stalks and other unwanted biomass. Currently, those projects are only able to remove negligible amounts of carbon from the atmosphere-they would have to scale up to an almost unimaginable size to make a difference in the world’s emissions trajectory. Technologists seized on that imperative, with venture capitalists pouring money into startups attempting everything from sucking carbon out of the air with enormous fans to sinking carbon-rich biomass into the deep ocean. More and more scientists were saying that wrenching the world back onto a livable emissions trajectory would no longer just require halting carbon pollution, but also involve somehow finding a way to remove billions of tons of emissions from the atmosphere in the decades ahead. Decades of delay in cutting emissions had painted humanity into a corner. It happened though, that there was a new area of climate action well-suited to Silicon Valley’s interests.
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