#189

Guest: Taylor Francis, co-founder of Watershed

One day when he was 13, Taylor Francis walked out of the movie theater, and he was pissed off. He had just seen Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and internalized a “generational call to arms, that my parents had screwed our generation” by causing the climate crisis, he says. 14 years later, he was working at Stripe and felt another call to arms: The 2020s would be a crucial decade for slashing carbon emissions and combating global warming. So, he and his co-founders Avi Itskovich and Christian Anderson all left Stripe to start Watershed, which helps companies measure and reduce their emissions.

In this episode, Taylor and Joubin discuss Patrick Collison, Dan Miller-Smith, hiring challenges, Jonathan Neman, “golden age syndrome,” John Doerr and Mike Moritz, the Climate Reality Project, steady partnerships, DRI cultures, shared context, social distancing, information sprawl, and the founders’ “woe is me” narrative.

Chapters:

01:02 Magnetic missions

06:40 How enterprise sustainability works

08:40 Watershed’s first client, Sweetgreen

11:04 Reflecting on the early days

16:36 Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth

18:53 Mobilizing teenagers

22:16 The origins of Watershed

27:04 Leaving Stripe and raising money

31:41 Interchangeable co-founders

33:06 The ground truth

35:25 The Dunbar Number

38:22 Watershed’s operating principles

41:56 Intensity, priorities, and sacrifice

47:37 Moving faster

50:26 Sustainability is a part of business

52:21 The topology of emissions

58:08 Who Watershed is hiring