Interview with Jack Policar of The Climate Wiki on the Opportunity in Tech on Ecology

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's episode of Conscious Design Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, author of the Conscious Design book. And I'm really excited today to have Jack Pollockar, co-director of Climate Wiki, looking to bring community together with climate change so we can Thanks, Ian.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so first, you're working on a lot of projects, so I don't know if we'll be able to touch on all of them because of how busy you are in this field. But how about we just start with what got you— what's your journey in getting to here, and what are you trying to do with the Climate Wiki and The other projects you're bringing together.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Happy to share the story. So originally grew up in the Bay Area, really saw tech migrate from the Valley into San Francisco itself and knew that I wanted to be around tech and entrepreneurship growing up. And I've spent the last 9 and a half years working in early stage startups, really focused on go-to-market marketing, sales, Sales partnerships brand, and within that time I was connected to Ubiquity University, which was an online social impact university that was trying to scale education affordable education globally, and they focused on entrepreneurship, leadership, climate change, and sustainability. And through sort of the sustainability track, I was helping develop courses and. working with some really amazing people who had a long history working in climate, connected to Stanford, NASA, just doing really amazing work from the '70s and '80s. So became introduced into really the climate reality and what we need to start doing to create a more sustainable world and society. And that was let's call that 7, 8 years ago, and just got hooked. Really realized that this is one of the biggest issues facing humanity right now. And I just started looking at all the different ways of how I could get involved, how I could make an impact, how I could make this my life work. And this story, I think, is shared by a lot of different people, may have a different intro, but that just realization of, look, I don't want to contribute to the problem. I want to help solve the problem. And that really sort of matched with my interest and passion of technology and sort of seeing the startup industry as this opportunity to make things happen really quickly with small teams and solve big problems. So those 2 things really lined up for me. And over the last 7, 8 years within climate, I've still been working in traditional startups, consulting with more climate tech startups, working on climate tech projects, initiatives, helping out where I can, being a part of communities where I can, and really all the time educating myself. And so where I've found myself now is really deciding, okay, look, I'm diving in the deep end and going headfirst into really taking this on as my career and finding this intersection of climate and technology. And the The main way that I've been able to encapsulate all of this is through the Climate Wiki. And the Climate Wiki came from really me seeing this problem online, really during the pandemic, just talking with people who are like, oh yeah, we're looking for this resource, or we're looking, who are the top VCs? What are the top climate educational resources?

Right.

And just have bookmarks of thousands of things like on my browser. I was just creating Google Docs for people to sort of answer this question of, oh, here, I created you a Google Doc, and it just wasn't scaling. So I realized, why don't I take all my resources and information and just put them in this database? And that started to take off. That really started getting some traction. People were appreciative of just having this database. And that sort of just transformed into the wiki and being able to have it as a crowdsourced resource to just help it grow and build from there. And realized that this was a great platform because I had been— I haven't really specialized or focused on any area of climate, like really interested in energy and the electrification of everything, but also really passionate about what's happening in the plant-based space and the plant-based movement. And within all of those different verticals, I've just seen this line of a need for community and for communication. And I really found that the Climate Wiki was a great platform for that, and it brought together all of these people. It provided educational resources, data, information, like generally resources on anything that you can think of in the climate sustainability space. And through that, we built community of just all these people coming together. And, and, and within that ecosystem We've really been able to start understanding, okay, how are we communicating? Because that's a massive issue within the space is, I mean, on the energy side, you have some really technical solutions where people are struggling taking that technical solution and communicating it to someone who may not have that technical background.

Right.

Helping them realize the sort of common application of what's being delivered. And so really right now we're, we're at the early stages of Climate Wiki. We're still in beta right now, working with a bunch of different partners. On one side, we're actually working in the carbon offset space with an internal product called Carbon Compare, and that's helping people navigate how to buy carbon offsets. And there are just hundreds of different resources to do that, from an individual all the way up to enterprise. And Buying carbon is just difficult, or buying carbon offsets online.

It's an experience if you, if you haven't done it before. It's definitely, yeah, a rabbit hole.

And we just, we sort of like looked at Kayak, and Kayak was like, yeah, we just skinned the UI for purchasing like travel experiences and made it a lot easier. And we were like, yeah, we could do that for carbon offsets. And so it's awesome because again, The Climate Wiki keeps like producing these new opportunities of like a platform-level area launchpad to test out these new ideas. So Carbon Compare, we were sort of playing with, has an idea of its own platform, but we said, okay, no, you know what, we can launch that within the Climate Wiki as sort of like an incubator to test this out and just add it as another resource where people are looking at carbon offsets, instead of just giving them a list of the websites, we can help break down actually what the differences between these marketplaces and different types of offsets and things like that.

That's amazing. Yeah, being able to actually compare and figure out what, which one should you do, or what's actually going to work, and then walking the handholding part, right? I feel like it's, it's something a lot of people are like, well, that's great that, you know, Whatever, maybe Nike's buying some carbon offsets, but they have a team and they have, right, they have, they have a whole team of people figuring out how and doing it. And I'm, I'm just a little one-person or even, you know, 10-person company, but none of us have a, have a full-time 40 hours a week to go figure out how to do this, how to, how to buy some offsets, how to, how to try to offset what we're doing. So I think Yeah, I see a huge, huge need for something like that.

Yeah, and that's exactly where we're looking at that need. And then, okay, what's the next step? Is it education? Is it— we've been connecting with a lot of consultants in the carbon offset space, and it's like, are we building a registry to help connect these consultants with companies who need more handholding through the whole process rather than just a a software platform. And then again, it's, it's a great space where we can incubate within the Climate Wiki umbrella to, to understand and, and know where we need to, to move the roadmap. And, um, so that's another, another product that we're doing within the Climate Wiki now is a marketplace, uh, for perks and discounts from new sustainable goods and services company. So that was originally called Pistachio. We're still working with the name, whether it's just going to be under the Climate Wiki or if it's going to be Pistachio incubated within the Climate Wiki. But that came from, again, this interest of individuals saying, okay, how do I take action? How do I get involved? I don't even know where to start. And so really Pistachio had this sort of a double-layer platform where the first part was the Action Hub, and the Action Hub connected educational partners of your resources. So we were speaking with Drawdown, Drawdown Labs, looking at TerraDew, really on, again, more of the educational side. And then you had the Perks platform, which was, let's go to a plant-based chicken nuggets company, and if we're connecting new customers, what type of discount can you give them? So you actually have the discount model through the Perks platform. And, and that was really helping solve a need for all of these new brands that are trying to launch. And it's a crowded space you're competing in.

It is.

Yeah, you have the traditional product, how are you educating people and getting people to see these are our new plant-based chicken nuggets or our new sustainable runners that have an incredibly low footprint? Like, it's, It's crowded and we saw a lot of opportunity to, again, meet needs on multiple sides, um, by offering this as an educational and discount platform to be able to help people transition to a lower footprint lifestyle.

Right. And, and one of the important— I mean, you started this off, you, the community side too. And right, because some of it obviously, obviously getting people to move over to more sustainable lifestyle, first you need to educate them, right? They need to know that it's possible. And then you have to educate them how to start doing it and provide the resources for them to actually do it. And I think it's— you're also focused on this community part, which basically it's a huge part of how we operate as As humans, right? We are— me going off by myself away from the tribe was deadly, and my brain still thinks so. Um, and we're so, so hardwired. So what is your— and I feel like that component, we've— we all— there's like little groups and, right, and there's small things, but there isn't— I think there's opportunity to grow more. So can you talk a little bit about what your approach is and how you're How you're building that supportive network to help people, you know, start this and then keep going, right? 'Cause the other thing is you started and then you realize you're alone and so you quit because you have, you don't have that community support there.

Exactly. And, and I think we saw that and really my strategy as well as working with my partners on this project have, has really been, okay, we have the ability to test and iterate. Again, that's sort of like my startup background of like, okay, let's, Act as quickly as possible, ship products, ship initiatives, and, and get these into market so we can test them and see what's working and what's not working. So I have a couple anecdotes on that, but overall we really see the Climate Wiki again being an amazing opportunity as sort of the brain and the hub of this community. So it's okay, how do we build the actual community? How is the community communicating? How is it supporting? And right now there are opportunities to partner with sort of these, the small niche communities that you've been talking about, of like whether it's the Slack from Work on Climate or even connecting with the On Deck Climate Fellowship. They're building amazing community over there, really high impact to all of sort of the Web3 online Discord communities. How are they sort of looped into, again, this, this this hub, this wiki, this brain within the climate space. And I would say personally, the way that we're starting with a couple of these climate community initiatives, we tested out over the pandemic, we had a virtual online sustainability community through Upstream, which is an awesome platform. They've now shifted more into the Web3 space. I would suggest anybody who's in Web3 check them out 'cause they're building amazing product. around DAOs now. And within that, we've shifted the online community because we saw, look, as people start shifting back into in-person, the online communities go far in the sense of their reach and the ability of— we're connecting people in Germany to people in San Francisco, and those lines of communication across borders are amazing. we've also found that there's this real demand and interest in in-person interaction. And a lot of people are saying, look, we're getting so much more done when we're face-to-face and sitting down around the table. And so with that, we're actually sort of shifting that online community that we built at Upstream into a small initiative that we're gonna start testing in the next couple of months called the Climate Dinner Club. And really the idea around that spurred from, seeing all the action that happens at the COPs and everybody's saying, yeah, no, like things are happening on stage, but the real conversations are happening in the hallway and they're happening over dinner after all the programming is done. And even looking back at like the civil rights movement, of all of the meetings happened around the dinner table, and that was part necessity, but the story really comes around from people joining together around a table. Having food there is a great way to bring community together. And it's like the conversations that get spurred from that is really where we wanted to develop an opportunity to have structure around these dinners. We're going to be launching in Denver-Boulder area, and then also in New York, and then plan to expand that to some friends in San Francisco and see if we can really build a structure and scaffolding to actually scale that in the US and then abroad. if we can, if we can find a good system for that. And outside of that, then sort of the next test is actually launching this week, which is bringing university students together. There are a number of volunteers who are working with us from a number of great universities here in the US, and students and Gen Z students are incredibly passionate and driven to really solve climate change and start looking at climate mitigation? How do we, again, move to a more sustainable system? And they're just incredibly energetic when it comes to jumping in, rolling up their sleeves, and getting stuff done. And so with them, we're launching the Gen Z Climate Slack. And we've seen this successful model in a number of different verticals. but there's nothing for Gen Z and climate in Slack of that community. And again, we're going to test them being a digital native generation.

Yes.

Push that envelope of like, okay, how much can we get done on this Slack? But it was also addressing a much bigger issue of volunteers at like, I think, 4 or 5 different schools right now, but they're really siloed within their own programs. And we were like, look, like, wouldn't it be awesome if like Students from MIT are able to talk to the students from Fordham and are able to talk to students from Berkeley and compare what they're working on and see if they want to work on things together and just generally sharing resources. And again, the benefit of having that connected to the Climate Wiki is they're able to share resources within a hub that's on like the student section of the wiki and then able to communicate within Slack. So that's a— Yeah.

Yeah, that reminds me, there's a— there was a nonprofit startup, um, I, I think they got off the ground, and, and their whole thing was they're— they, they like surveyed all the different nonprofits that have been started because there's, there's so many, you know, small ones, and they're really usually super focused, right? Like this one, one is we would just want to give tennis shoes to kids. that so they can go to school wearing not worn out tennis shoes. Like, and what they realized is after surveying all over just the US, there, there were usually a lot of really small charities that had no idea that the others existed, all focused on the same thing. So it was like 50 tennis shoe-focused charities for kids. Like, that's— and, and so they built a platform and a system to say, hey, You're actually not alone. You're not working in this little— you feel siloed, but actually, if you guys actually connect and start to share resources— and so that was our whole platform, was helping people even be aware that, yeah, you have— you might feel like you're alone over here, but there's probably a bunch of other people you just don't know about trying to do the same exact thing. And so that's what they were building community around, that around just just charities. And, um, what you're describing reminds me of that because you're going, hey, over at this school, over in this state, you guys are doing the same thing. Why don't you connect and start sharing those resources instead of everyone trying to reinvent the wheel every single time?

Exactly.

Which is hard. I mean, imagine, imagine if we all had to invent our own car in every city. Like, that would be excruciatingly painful. You'd go to the next town and And realize they invented the wheel already.

What?

We just came up with it.

Wheel, and they could have helped you out. Yeah, no, it's right. There's a lot of parallels between that and even the greater Climate Wiki of just people. I, I remember it was like a phrase that was our problem, and it was like, oh, I wish I knew that was a thing earlier, or I can't believe I didn't know about this. And like, I, I sort of solved problems off like, what are the phrases that people are saying that is this problem. And it was that, it was, oh my gosh, I didn't know they were creating the car in the next town over. They could have helped. This could have been so much easier. And yeah, I mean, even within the students, that's sort of where we realized the student hub opportunity and how I got connected with a number of the student volunteers is that I was mentoring at a number of these programs, mentoring, judging pitch competitions, things like that. And within those, it was like, I remember I was doing one at UPenn, And one of the teams was working on something that was incredibly similar to some students I was talking to at CU Boulder. And I was like, yeah, like I should connect you guys. And if I wouldn't have made that connection, they would have never, or not never, but like it would have been such an off chance that they would have found the work that they were doing. Because again, it was just so siloed and they were able to help each other out. So, you know, it's, it's connecting these dots, it's connecting the pieces. Because the way I look at this is The fight for climate is time sensitive. And sure, we'd eventually be able to get all this stuff done, but we need to get it done ASAP.

Right.

And so as much as we can look at the mission of the Climate Wiki is to speed up and really expedite all of these connections, facilitating the connection of information to people who are making impact, We believe that, I mean, again, this is coming from startup, but the more data, the better. And with more data, you're gonna be making better decisions and more informed decisions. And so that's really where we believe that we have this opportunity to really move things forward at a faster pace.

Yeah, and I would, I just did an interview a couple weeks ago with a journalist with a startup, and they're taking environmental data and modeling out, you know, risk analysis for property and buildings.

Mm-hmm.

And it's just one of those, we've been collecting the data since the '70s. Like, they have a, they have a 50-year-old data set to work with, and it's just that nobody has, has sat down. Everybody's looked at it and been like, well, that's a bunch of numbers, I don't know what to do with it, and they walked away for 50 years. We've done that. And now Now somebody was finally like, hey, we have 50 years of data. How about we actually put it together and start using it and make it usable so that we can start making decisions based on it? Because 50 years of data is a lot of data to have.

Yeah.

And, and I feel like that's something that kind of what you're addressing too is like, we have all these resources, we've been figuring out stuff. And, you know, this acceleration path is really just say, hey everyone, stop for a second. Um, we actually have been all repeating a bunch of the same stuff. When we combine those together and pull those resources, we can stop reinventing and we can just actually take the next step instead of some of us being on step A and some of us on step C, and we didn't know that C had already happened somewhere.

Or even, even joining together. I think that's a huge opportunity, is I want to— again, I mean, we can talk about all the ideas and things that spin off of the Climate Wiki, but really a partnerships hub and sort of helping facilitate, because we're talking to a lot of the companies that we're showing on the wiki. And so there's this opportunity to actually be a dot connector and sort of make the introduction ourselves of company A is like, oh my gosh, I didn't know company B even existed. That would be so helpful for us to be able to meet them, yada yada, moving from there. And really we're able to test that within Carbon Compare because we're talking to a lot of the companies that we're bringing into that product. And so being able to talk to one founder and then another founder and saying, hey, you guys have a really complementary product, you guys should meet and be able to talk. So yeah, excited about that.

Yeah. And I feel like that goes for even, even the funding side of things.

I was—

we're all hearing about, you know, there's more people investing in climate. But there's a different fact to like, start connecting because I feel like it's like everything else, there's way more people wanting to invest in climate change and climate tech than we know about. We're just all— we're all just sitting, you know, 3 steps away from each other not knowing we're in the other room, and it's just not connecting. So that's hugely beneficial to be able to start connecting those resources together because then we can start making those investments and moving forward.

And it's funny you bring that up. You're literally touching on all of our future projects. So that's actually another one That we're planning on being internal to the Climate Wiki first, which was Flower Shop Capital. And sort of the initial— I mean, my goals are to eventually be able to open one move past angel investing syndicate VC. And so we saw some of the first steps, one, being able to provide deal flow to investors who are interested in climate, because again, we're seeing all of these companies who are interested. So we We wanna connect those dots. And the number of VCs who were interested in signing up for our deal flow newsletter was amazing. And sort of the next step past that—

That's awesome.

Talking to the YC company, Aerist, and they're doing text message-based education. And they're like, there's a big gap of VCs who want to learn how to invest in climate, but don't know how. And so we're actually looking at bite-sized educational content for VC to learn, like on their phone. They're on the phone all the time anyway. So like text message education of like, these are the foundational principles of being able to invest in climate tech opportunities. And again, the number of VC were like, yeah, we need to start attacking this. And we have the opportunity, we have a huge platform to be able to really create a lot of impact. There's a lot of interest there. So we're looking at like, okay, how do we tie in a lot of the capital pieces into what we're doing and sort of moving things forward and tying that to the newsletter as well, because again, just so many connection points and sort of data that can be shared.

Yeah, yeah, I think we keep talking about it because there's so many data points. There is, there is so much, you can't separate them, right? You can't just show founders their thing and then show employees their thing. It's an ecosystem and there's a lot of points to get into. And it's great, you guys are tackling, you have this clear roadmap right in front of you of people keep coming to us and you're able to test, which is great. You're able to use the wiki platform as a way to validate, yes, there is need, there is an interest. Which I'm sure we're all guessing there is, but it's nice to validate it, you know, and the investors enjoy validating it too. So you're able to validate it and then take those steps forward, which, you know, as you're going through that and you're evaluating, have you run down any path where you've found there isn't an interest yet? Is there— have you run into that? Or has it been more people are ready? ready and interested, and it's more as fast as you can put it out.

I mean, it's that. It's, it's, I mean, we're, we're seeing 100+ visits a day without doing any marketing. Like I said, we're, we're still in beta, and so that's 100 visits a day of people just word of mouth sharing it with each other. And again, that, that may not be a lot at scale, but like, we've really, really kept this private. We have not done a lot of marketing. in any form. So for us, again, exploring like the partnership opportunities, exploring Carbon Compare, exploring the university side, exploring even the early stages of Flower Shop Capital, like there's a lot of interest. And for us, it's more about, okay, how do we continue to execute on this and build a really solid foundation? Because I mean, you sort of mentioned it, but really the goal here is building ecosystem. And at all of my jobs within startup, I just, I see so much value provided by ecosystem, community, and communication. And sort of those 3 factors, we just want to build all of that into really the pillars of what the Climate Wiki is and can be. And so again, for us, it's like the balance of looking at sort of the nonprofit side versus the going and raising even small amounts of venture capital, because right now we're primarily bootstrapped. has been a good lesson of like, okay, what do we actually need capital for to take advantage of the interest in what we're producing right now and sort of being able to keep up with demand and launching other modules and initiatives?

Awesome. Well, this is exciting. I'm excited to see you guys keep moving and, you know, you guys have moved forward quite a few steps, it seems, just from the first time we started talking. Which is great. That was not that long ago. So, you know, it's good to see that there is momentum and that there's gonna be a platform that you guys are, when you're able to launch, do you have a date that you are aiming to go public and actually start, you know, really trying to have people see the platform?

Yeah, absolutely. So again, right now, I mean, people can visit the climate.wiki And when I say it's in beta, we're not, again, moving slowly on production. There's a lot of things happening on the backend.

Right.

So it's definitely still rough around the edges. It looks like an MVP, but that helps us in the way of, instead of just raising capital right now or going out and getting some grants and just dumping capital into building the best product, best looking product, I really believe in iteration. And I believe to do this right, we're going to have a much more solid product by moving step by step and building something that really has a strong foundation to it. So, um, to answer the question, uh, we're looking at the beginning of Q3 as our official launch. So sort of as people come back from summer and vacation and time, uh, really just gearing up towards, uh, a really strong sort of second half of the year launch and Have some aggressive OKRs that we're looking at for that. But I think it's the perfect time to sort of incubate exactly what we want things to look like at launch and gives us enough wiggle room to really test things out. I don't look at competition in this space. I look at if there's someone who wants to do a better version of this, awesome. Like, I'm going to go work for them. But for me, it's, it's really this shared sentiment and like, I would say 98% of the conversations I'm having with other founders, just anybody in this space, it's just this shared value of, look, we're all doing this together. The mission is more important than our individual ego or mission. And like, we need to be looking at this as we're all helping the world and making this a more sustainable place to be. So that's, that's really how I'm looking at it all.

Well, that's a great way to look at it. Hopefully, more and more people continue to join you in looking at it that way. So that— because otherwise, that is the only way forward, right? Is we need to work together and solve things together and keep one foot in front of the other. And that's how you get there.

Good way to look at it.

Well, awesome. You mentioned the website already. Is there— for anybody that wants to connect, partner, get involved in it? Uh, is there, besides the website, is there any other place that they should go or connect to you with?

I'm, I'm huge on LinkedIn. Um, starting to shift more things into Twitter. My Twitter DMs are open. LinkedIn DMs are definitely open. Um, but also feel free to just shoot me an email. Um, I can, I'll leave that somewhere in a link, but it's paulakar.jack@gmail.com. So probably going to get a bunch of spam off that, but if I even get a few good connections, it's worth it.

So perfect. And we'll, we'll make sure that those links are in the description for everyone. So perfect. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it. It's been, it's been great chatting with you and you being able to share what you're, what you're up to.

Absolutely. Thank you, Ian. Thanks for giving me this opportunity.