A founder explains how Patch started with cofounder Aaron, drawing on experience from Sonder. They chose carbon removal over decarbonization because existing carbon markets have poor liquidity, lack transparency, and charge high commissions. Patch built an API to embed carbon removal into software so companies can scale it without friction.
Chapters
Like, what was like the founding story for Patch? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I gave a little bit of my background, but when Aaron and I decided we wanted to start, first and foremost, we actually decided we wanted to start a company of our own. We had done a lot of zero-to-one stuff at Sonder actually. So we kind of knew we worked well together. We had launched several unique teams, including like the supply growth and supply chain teams there. And so we knew we kind of had that chemistry, if you will. And we really wanted to see if we could replicate that outside of the well-financed ecosystem that was Sonder. You know, it's really easy to do it when you work for a company that's raised like over $400 million in venture. It's a much different exercise to do it when it's just you and the buck stops with you. So that's kind of step 1. Step 2 was really me really wanting to bring it back to climate. It was the whole reason I got a formal education, and the unfortunate reality is basically there's— because we're not really on the right track, every day that goes by becomes more relevant relevant problem to address. And so when you think about mitigating climate change, you have 2 major levers. You have the decarbonization lever. So that's how do you pollute less? So that's rolling out renewable energy, that's electrifying vehicle fleets, things like that. The second lever is how do you remove carbon? So that's actually taking carbon out of the carbon cycle and storing it in some sort of stable way. So one is preventing stopping the bleeding, if you will, so prevent actually more pollution from being emitted. And the other one is actually commandsying or undoing the damage that's already been done. And we actually had the perspective that although there's a huge amount of work to be done on the decarbonization front, between like the advances we were seeing in electric vehicles or the cost of renewable energy going through the floor, we felt like the snowball, the decarbonization snowball, if you will, had kind of begun to accumulate a little bit. And although, you know, we're still, you know, 10, 20 years out from like, you know, really meaningful decarbonization, we felt like the carbon removal part wasn't really even beginning to accumulate that momentum. And so we really wanted to focus on this piece of the equation. And when you dive into carbon markets, which is how you access carbon removal, it's this kind of this existing ecosystem where you can buy and sell different forms of carbon removal, which is, for those who don't know, carbon removal again is taking CO2 out of the carbon cycle and storing it in some sort of stable way. But there's no software managing this ecosystem. And so what ended up happening were all the problems you typically see in non-digitized markets before some sort of marketplace. So there's incredibly poor liquidity, poor supply transparency and price transparency, commission structures are incredibly high. So there's a lot of value destruction, really all the— and activation was high. And so really all the cruft that comes with B2B procurement that really exists before, like, you know, Fare existed or Airbnb existed or any of these other marketplaces existed with carbon markets. So really we thought, well, we just need to apply the same marketplace principles We saw, you know, in the many, many, many incredible marketplaces businesses that came before us to this existing market. So not actually a particularly novel concept. The thing that's a little bit different about Patch that's a little bit more rare is that we took this API-first distribution technique. And the reason we did that goes back to the initial goal. And the goal is to remove gigaton scale of carbon removal. So I didn't get to mention that before, but, you know, Most climate models have us needing to remove anywhere from 10 to 15 gigatons, so 10 to 15 trillion kilograms of CO2 per year for the next 2 to 3 decades. It's an immense, immense amount of mass. And so, you know, kind of putting that aside, that's going to come— that mass or that CO2 is going to come from hundreds of billions of transactions, which will require hundreds of billions of carbon calculations and capital allocations or basically purchasing or transacting in carbon markets in order to get that CO2 out of the air. And so our thought process was, well, whenever hundreds of billions of anything happen per year, it's usually a computer doing it. So how do you build an interface a computer can understand, an API, rather than interface a human can understand, like some sort of visual experience on airbnb.com or any other marketplaces, you know, that can augment the existing systems directly we've already built, whether it's a payment facilitator. We actually work with a bunch of marketplace businesses like for e-commerce, travel management systems, whatever it might be, to automate the process of climate action. And instead of having some sort of separate ecosystem you have to go to transact with this particular flow, it's built into the flows we already use day to day. And that's what we truly believe is that certs get to ubiquity of climate action. So that's kind of why we took this approach.
