Diego Saez Gil - How Pachama Uses Tech to Solve Climate Change

Alright guys, welcome to the podcast! How's it going to you? It's going great. So today we have Diego Sayis Gil of Pochamma from the Winter '19 batch and Gustav Helstrom, who is a partner at YC. So today we're here to talk about Diego's company. Gustav, why don't you start us out?

Sure! So I met Diego probably about a year and a half ago now, and our paths crossed in sort of the interest for carbon removal. I've called it "Finch signs," any more French sort of area, but it certainly crossed in the area of trying to solve climate change: how you can use technology to solve climate change. It’s something that we at YC have spent quite a bit of time on. Back about a year ago, we released a carbon request for startups. A carbon removal request to startups was a way for us to inspire people that work on new companies about what to work on, and we presented a bunch of ideas there about things that people can work on. Diego has a very interesting approach to his company, and I’d love to hear more. But this is not his first company, so maybe before we get into Pochamma, tell us about your background. You've founded 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 the Yungas, which is the last tip of the Amazon-type rainforest in the north of Argentina. 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. After finishing school, I got a scholarship to do a master's in Barcelona, moved from Argentina to Barcelona, took advantage to travel as a backpacker all across Europe, and then that journey led me to New York City for one internship. 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! 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-Breakfasts. Initially, it 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 sells discounted flights for students. Right after that, I went to Argentina to visit my family, and I lost a suitcase on the trip. That led to the next idea, which was how there are no suitcases that you can track. With a friend in New York, we decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign and started BlueSmart, 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 hardware company was a completely new adventure for me. It was really difficult. Did you have any background in building hardware before? Not at all. My co-founder told me he had been to China sourcing merchandising, but I had never been to China. Right after YC, we moved to Hong Kong, we opened an office there, and we started going to Shenzhen every week. This company flew quite high; we raised a lot of capital thanks to YC and thanks to the traction that we were having. We were selling a lot of our products and grew the team to over 60 people. Everything was going great, although always with a lot of challenges, like every hardware company, up until the airlines decided to ban lithium-ion batteries because Samsung phones were getting on fire on airplanes, which is something you cannot expect as a startup to be, you know, how your products banned.

What was the vision for the company, like what you were trying? Yeah, I mean, the vision was to use technology to make travel better, but there wasn't like this grand vision to improve the world, to be honest. Were you the first company to embed a battery in a suitcase? We were, yes. We're the first! It's all like standard now; you know other great companies came afterwards, you know, bringing innovation to lag. By the way, to me, the biggest lesson 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. Then you have a new category on 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 it to good use to solve one of the biggest problems that humanity faces today?"

So anyways, that company ended up in this very difficult situation. We were able to sell the assets of the company, the technology, and the IP, but the company didn't end in a good exit. After that, I decided to take some time off, do a lot of soul-searching, went with my two brothers to the Amazon rainforest, spent some time with some Native communities there, got incredibly inspired by the power of nature, and also got incredibly heartbroken seeing deforestation happening there at the border of the Amazon and civilization. Then I moved here to the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I live now, among the redwoods, and from there started researching and thinking about what I was going to do next. Climate change and the environmental crisis was my biggest concern. At the same time, I had this inspiration from the forest where I had been. I was reading a book; I discovered or I learned the potential that reforestation and forest conservation has to capture carbon at scale on the planet and is one of the most important solutions to climate change. Nobody was talking about this at the time—this was two years and a half ago.

So then that led me to research how technology could enable that solution, and I decided to come back to the road, even though it was 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. Then I talked to you, and you received me, and I drew on a whiteboard the idea, and you told me this is a really good idea; go for it. I can tell you what it is now, but that's a background of how I got to Pochamma.

So tell us what Pochamma does? I mean there’s this a lot of people who have ideas of how to solve climate change. I believe technology will be at the core of solving it, like most big problems humanity has faced in the past. Technology has somewhat helped solve, yeah. So maybe tell me about Pochamma—what does it do?

Sounds like a good idea to plant trees, but in what way do you do this? The first question that we asked was, okay, if reforestation and forest conservation is such a big solution and such an easy solution—we know how to plant trees—why are we not doing it? The answer to that is: Somebody has to pay for that! We were not driving funding to it; there is no economic incentive to do it today. 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 for those emissions. 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 growth at the beginning, and then after the financial crisis, it kind of crashed. But after the Paris Agreement, the market is growing again. 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, it’s less than 2 percent.

So then the question that we ask is: Okay, why does this happen? We learned that there were two problems. Number one: If you want to certify a forest project today—let’s say that you want to plant trees; you have land, and you want to do reforestation or do forest conservation—you have to go through a certification process that takes two years and costs between a hundred and four hundred thousand dollars because you have to get auditors sent to your field to count trees and measure the size of trees every certain period of time. That is very inefficient. As a result, there aren’t that many projects in the U.S.; there are less than 50 projects that cost certification for carbon credits. In South America, there are less, and you know the only projects are very large projects.

On the other hand, buyers of carbon offsets, in a way, stayed away from forests because of a 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 are correct? How do I know I'm not going to get in trouble if there’s a problem in the project? Which leads to fraud—common, it's not common, but it happens sometimes. There were people that took advantage of carbon credits because they’re such an abstract concept, and there were some problems with projects in which illegal deforestation happened, maybe not under the awareness or control of the project developers, but something that did happen.

What problems in the past was it? Was it the problems related to it being hard to track? Or was the problem 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, for 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 in remote sensing and artificial intelligence to do our verification and monitoring of how much carbon is there in 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. Then we use machine learning algorithms, and I can go into specifics of how we do it to analyze those data points of a forest. You can be incredibly precise today at estimating carbon storage and carbon capture by forests. So those tools help facilitate the certification of projects; they increase the credibility of the projects; they allow for constant monitoring, and they bring a whole new transparency and efficiency to the onboarding of new projects.

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 carbon credits generally have to go to brokers. The brokers get their credits from, you know, a trader; the trader maybe from a retailer, and the retailer from a, you know, a lot of middlemen along the way. If we are going to be onboarding these projects and doing this data analysis, why don't we connect the projects directly with the buyers? 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 I am buying, where the carbon credits are stored? Exactly! You can enter the platform, see different projects around the world—see exactly where they’re 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, a description of the co-benefits. Because by the way, one important thing about forests is that they not only 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 in the way that we display the projects on our platform.

So I think one thing that might be interesting to kind of give this a little context is to talk about magnitudes. For an average—I mean, we don’t have to talk about specific customers, but for an average company, how much land are we talking about? How much carbon are they trying to offset?

Yeah, so it's a good question because there are many companies that are for the first time valuing, you know, becoming carbon neutral, offsetting their emissions, and it turns out that it’s not that expensive. For certain companies, for example, service companies or 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, it’s about six tons per employee per year for emissions. Today, you know, prices of carbon credits range between five and twenty dollars.

So it's not a lot of money to offset a ton? Okay, yeah, so there’s, after that, an employee in all of its emissions; it's 50 bucks, or it could be a hundred dollars—between fifty and a hundred and fifty dollars per employee per year for a service company at that price level.

And how much land is, for just for context? So let's see, one hectare of land of full-grown forest contains about 200 tons. Now, you know, carbon credits get issued in terms of how much additional carbon a forest project captures, so that depends. There are different types of projects I can explain, but 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, 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 beyond our footprint and focus on the protection they're doing and not just on the carbon offsetting.

So we talked a lot about tons of CO2, so that's typically the unit that people are using to measure carbon emissions. The world is emitting 35 or 40 gigatons a year—that's an enormous amount! Can you talk about just like the opportunity of foresting? Like, how big is there? Like is there an opportunity? Because I... there's a venture firm, Bill Gates’ investment from Victorian Adventures; they say they would only invest in things that have a minimum opportunity of, I think it’s like one gigaton or one half percent, 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 one billion hectares on 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 have a potential to draw down about 200 gigatons of carbon— not of CO2 but of carbon; CO2 is, you know, times 3.6. Yep, that is about two-thirds of the emissions that we put in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

Wow! So we’re talking about probably the most meaningful solution, and this is discounting not counting forest restoration or forest conservation, which is the standing forest that we have today, especially the rainforests that capture a lot of carbon, right? In the Amazon, in Borneo, and Congo— that we should stop deforesting right now because these forests continue to capture carbon over their entire lifetime. So yes, these are meaningful numbers, and the main problem that is missing is that the incentives aren’t there. Is it that the incentives don’t exist, or they’re not available to most of those landowners?

Exactly, they’re not available because the carbon market—that's a flow of capital going to carbon markets—is growing 50 percent year over year since the Paris agreement. 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 CORSIA framework, and we're talking about 160 million tons 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-based solutions. 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 so forth, right?

We hope that in the next few decades, hundreds of billions of dollars will go to solving climate change as we realize the importance of these and the urgency, and there will be a need for a platform that transparently, efficiently, and effectively transfers that capital to the right solutions, and we hope to be that platform.

Maybe you can dive in on the trust question. 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 trust in your system so that we can change that narrative?

Yeah, I mean, the reason people didn't trust them is because of 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 it was calculated, how it's monitored, and how it’s traded. That should happen online, like every other industry that received, you know, the internet treatment.

Right, kind of like Airbnb; you can go and find every single place around the world, and that's in there. As a homeowner or landowner, I can figure out what the value of my land is on the carbon markets. Exactly, yeah! So the lack of trust was because of a lack of transparency, data, and information, and that’s going to change.

Just a specific question: how do you make sure that something isn’t double-counted? I don’t make sure the same carbon credit is on your platform and another platform at the same time?

Yeah, well, there are these registries, and these registries are in a way cross-accounting. 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 toward the Paris agreement, in which a country can claim the carbon capture for forests; and maybe inside of that land, there’s a particular private project that also got carbon credits, so you had to assure that you account for that. Again, it’s just about data and making the data accessible and standardized.

So one more question here—so what's the difference between reforestation and afforestation? And also, one common concern people have about forests capturing carbon is that forests eventually die or eventually, you know, burn or whatever, causing carbon to be re-emitted.

Yeah, yeah, so, okay, there are four types of forest projects and more probably, but there’s forest conservation, which means you have a standing forest, and what you do is commit not to cut it down—that’s what's needed in the Amazon rainforest, for example. 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 do agriculture, and that’s a 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 forests in which timber logging was done, and basically, a commitment is to do a more regenerative type of harvesting in which you harvest every couple of decades, you replant trees, you re-enrich the forest, and you can continue harvesting timber but with a more sustainable practice.

Number three is reforestation, which is just planting trees in a place where there used to be a forest in the past. Afforestation is to plant trees in a place where there wasn't a forest in the past, so you have to prepare the soil—it's basically certifying or converting a desert into a 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 are a lot of, you know, places available for restoration. At some point, we could, you know, we have the engineering capacity to, you know, do engineering and modify environments, you know, as powerfully as we did with civilization.

We could, you know, easily plant forests, you know, for example. I know it sounds hard, right?

So, in terms of differences between these methods, are there certain benefits to logging sustainably? For instance, like is a new tree giving off more or 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 old-growth forests continue to capture carbon. The Borneo forest has millions of years of capturing carbon consistently. And while a forest, like every living ecosystem and organism, dies out and regenerates, when a tree dies out, yes, it releases some carbon. The net result, however, is actually carbon capture, and there is a lot of data that 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. I think that doing improved forest management on timber areas is an important practice in which we are optimizing for both carbon capture and wood production.

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? Do they go for that?

Yeah, yeah, 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 improved forest management, biodiversity is tested as well. And, you know, 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 for in a system.

So as a buyer of carbon, is that a choice I have to make? Do I want to make sure that the forest that I buy to capture carbon is diverse? Is that a choice I make? Is that a choice that shows on your platform?

I mean, right now, the protocols that are there to issue carbon credits have tests for biodiversity; it’s one of the questions that you have to answer for. In the future, we hope to present proposals for new protocols—something we can talk about—in which, you know, all the available data counts toward the amount of credits that the project gets, and biodiversity should have a weight there. But also, yes, buyers can and do prefer projects that protect wildlife and have biodiversity benefits because it’s just, it’s not just about carbon offsetting, right?

Got it! So you confirmed, Tomas is a machine-learning engineer from Pochamma, like a lending company. Talk to me about how you guys use technology. There's a lot of tech, and the data sources that you get—just talk to me about the basics of the platform.

Yeah, absolutely! Yes, Tomas is a machine-learning engineer, and we're, you know, building an amazing team on machine learning. We have forest scientists with expertise in machine learning, and we just hired a PhD in math that solved an unsolved geometrical problem—he’s known in the math world—and he’s a machine-learning engineer as well.

What we do is we are using a deep learning technique called convolutional neural networks that basically analyzes lidar data clouds of points of the forest that were collected by UAVs, by drones, or by satellites. In a way, it takes account of the shape of the forest, and based on that, can know how much biomass is there in the forest. We train the algorithms with ground truth of plots that were measured by, you know, forest services, measuring the trees, and then you train the model—the model learns to track, you know, giving a certain shape how much carbon is there.

We demonstrated this work from Elias, who is the PhD that works with us. For four years, he was working on this, and he demonstrated in New England less than 1.5 percent error at predicting how much carbon is there in a forest, comparing piloted had lighter but looking at satellite data too.

I’m very curious: how do you account for biodiversity in the model? Because I understand, so if you're mapping like altitudes, that's one thing; but, you know, just dead trees or tree concentration, for example, is a marker of biodiversity around where, you know, where there are many trees concentrated, and there is more wildlife.

I’m not an expert on that, but you know, there are some things that I’m picking up. So you can train the algorithm also to learn where there is more biodiversity, and 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, we 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! What are the big technical challenges right now for you guys?

So, I mean, data collection— we partnered 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, and ground truth, you know—again, field plot measurements. So, yes, we're 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 forests around the planet. They’re going to be releasing this data now in November, and 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 a technical perspective on the verification and insight is just data, but are data available equally around the world?

Not always. Sometimes 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 getting data from Peru and Brazil, so yeah.

Got it! So your company is less than a year old?

Mm-hmm! You scaled up pretty fast. Where are you today? Just give us roughly an idea of how far along you are and sort of like what are the bottlenecks that are preventing 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 built this model that works very well in North America and are starting to expand to South America. We partnered with some of the largest forest project developers in these two regions. We’ve onboarded over ten forest projects in the U.S. and Brazil onto a platform that we analyzed, validated, and listed on our platform. We’ve closed over ten customers and are in the process of closing some very big companies that are already purchasing carbon assets, and they love our approach.

I cannot, you know, say names yet, but you know these are very recognizable companies that have a high standard on everything they do.

So, and who generally are the buyers of these? Like, you mentioned the compliance markets—80 billion dollars. Like, is this mostly the operations, or is it countries or individuals who are the buyers?

Countries purchase carbon offsets at scale, but it’s mainly 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 technology companies, 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! All the sustainability departments in these companies are talking about it. Maybe talk about how the voluntary and the compliance kind of fit together because like I imagine that the more voluntary 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 this now because eventually we’ll be in compliance? We gotta get ready for it, or are they like this is what our customers or employees are demanding? How do you, what are the big ones like, yeah, why are they doing this?

Yeah, for example, airlines are in a case that they are going to be regulated in 2021, and yet many have started already offsetting their emissions and even offering their customers to offset their trips. You know, for example, Delta and United have developed the option to offset your flight.

It’s not super easy to do it on their website, 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 offsetting your emissions, of course, first you have to reduce, try to use, you know, renewable 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 making bulk changes versus individuals saying, like, yeah, I’m gonna offset one flight at a time?

I think it’s going to be everything. Governments regulate the industries, and it’s 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 it. We have to all take responsibility for our footprint. At the end of the day, companies are just creating products and services that we consumers consume, right?

So yeah, yeah, makes sense. So when we talk about fundraising—so after we put our request to start up, 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 for these companies. It was like dozens of engineering candidates—big companies said, "I wish I could work for the companies you have funded."

We didn’t have that many for summer teams at the time, and then there were investors who wanted to learn—many of them—and then there were people from the press. This is, I think, probably the toughest request for startup; they are generally the most amount of press interest of anything we've ever done. Still getting 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; 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 in? 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 my entrepreneurial history. 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 for value creation for society and therefore the opportunity to create valuable companies.

I think the vision that we described resonated with many investors, and yeah, I mean, we ended up raising almost twice as much as we wanted to raise initially from an amazing group of people. Our lead investor is Ryan Graves, the co-founder of Uber, who has experience building a global marketplace. We got investments from Chris Sacca, who funded over at the beginning—PG investor—and we got investments from Social Capital, Global Founders Capital, and even some small checks from, you know, funds like Accel and Atomico.

All those investors, I guess, saw in 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 among investors in climate change startups. Did you have to educate them about the solutions or like through the fundraiser, or did they come with a lot of prior knowledge?

No, no, definitely. I mean, I had to share all this information that I didn’t have myself, you know, at the beginning of this process. How carbon 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 in putting the Silicon Valley playbook into this company and avoid us from being trapped into a science project or a non-profit project, you know. So we’re a 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 aren’t pitching this in any way differently than Blue Smart. Sure!

Yeah, exactly! I know because I think the overwhelming notion is that you have to pitch something differently if you're trying to save the planet, right? I had to say something to every investor in the internet company. I told them before accepting their money: “Look, okay, now you’re convinced that this is a good business. I want to tell you this is a long-term company; it’s mission-driven; always the mission’s gonna move before profits, and it’s gonna take time. You know, we’re trying to build a company that solves 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. Really good companies take time, and really good companies are mission-driven.

So, I have one last question I want to ask. So, most startups don't have to spend too much time thinking 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 a lot of this is regulated and policy decisions probably go in your favor in the future and probably more of this, not less. I'm just, what do you hope to see 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 of the big polluters, energy companies, transportation, and 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 has happened with aerosols, right, and the ozone hole—we fixed it with regulations. And also, we fixed it with regulations for slavery, torture, and genocide, right?

So things that are wrong had to have a regulatory framework to fade them out. I do think that free markets are great, but at the same time, you know, the role of regulations in a capitalistic society is to bring society to where everybody wants to go.

Awesome! So just a couple of quick questions from Twitter before we wrap up. Sure! So Guillermo asks, what are some of the most important things 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 these, you know, registries that create standards and protocols, and they are super important because they’ve been doing 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 learned, I guess, about the importance of education; you know, frankly, this is a market that’s very confusing. You know, so I didn’t have as part of our strategy to have a content strategy, but now I realize that content is going to be super important. We need to create more awareness and more clarity. We have definitely learned a lot about the data part; we learned about how remote sensing is exponentiating the possibilities of capturing data on ecosystems.

That’s something that gets me really, really excited because one vision that we have for Pochamma is that we can become this kind of like platform for understanding deeply all the ecosystems of the planet. You know this idea that Buckminster Fuller had of having an operating manual for Spaceship Earth—imagine 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 the kind of things that we geek out in terms of data, and we learn a lot about the possibilities!

Yeah, that’s super cool! One more question—so, related—I ask, can food forests grown to be 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 it turns out, according to data I read, that agriculture inside of forests can actually produce more yield than traditional monoculture agriculture.

So, permaculture is another practice that has enormous potential, and these are things that, by the way, can also obtain carbon credits. So we hope to help those projects get additional income through that.

Awesome! Diego, thank you so much for coming!

Thank you so much for having me!