gustaf

I definately have never donated to Donald Trump and would never. It would have been easy to google tech for campaigns https://www.techforcampaigns.org/.

I work as a group partner at Y Combinator. Over the last 48 hours I've talked to numerous founders of YC companies who told me they can't make payroll to their employees next week. In many cases they had raised millions of dollars which is currently locked into their SvB accounts. Even if they get access to the insured $250k on Monday that won't last long and in many cases not even cover the payroll they are planning to run. YC wrote this petition with these founders in mind who in good faith trusted that their money would be safe in Silicon Valley Bank.

Making the world cut demand for concrete might actually sound dramatically harder than making zero-emission concrete. (and both are extremely hard!)

We are big believers in Nuclear energy, and it's part of the RFS.

But many other sectors need to be electrified for nuclear power to have its decarbonization impact: buildings, industry, transportation etc.

Which ideas are doomed to fail? I would love to hear your feedback

This isn't correct. SAFE isn't a debt instrument - its a right to own shares in a future round. You are probably thinking of convertible debt.

Congrats on the launch Alex - very happy for you and everyone you will be able to serve! /Gustaf

Very excited about this! Hoping more firms will make this decision

I have both a Facebook portal and a Sidekick (I work at YC) and I find there to be a huge difference between the UI of the Portal and how I use my Sidekick.

Before YC I worked at Airbnb and before that I worked at Voxer which was a pioneering company in asynchronous voice. A phone call is either on or off. Asynchronous is different and the other side and choose to participate or not. Facebook portal is to video what a phone call is to voice. Sidekick is much more what like Voxer is to voice.

Considering the value of [name-redacted] I'm surprised it's not higher price.

In the Summer 2020 batch every company is remote. My guess would be that 25% of the companies in the batch are currently based in the bay area.

You are right. Design is now a first class citizen thanks to Zain Ali joining YC as designer in December. Lots of more things in the works https://twitter.com/zainali?lang=en

I hope my answer didn't come off as ignorant to the COTAP story - I'm sorry if it did.

Thanks for sharing the backstory on Cool Effect. Their effort on marketing to me also reflect the type of marketing that don't work. After spending 5 years at the growth team of Airbnb I'm more convinced than ever that marketing have to have strong ROI that can be measured. If it does, it's an excellent way of growing something. And because of Google and Facebook's dominance, more and more this is becoming one of the very few ways to go really big. I know Wren isn't spending money on marketing yet but having a foundation where that is possible is a great chance to make a really big impact.

I totally agree that educating the rest of the country and policy etc are the top priorities but at the same time you have millions of individuals who want to take individual action but don't know exactly what to do. Both you and Wren seems like great options for them to be involved.

Great idea. This is what Pachama uses to base their analysis on. https://www.pachama.com - They did YC winter 2019.

This is a really good point. The goal of both Wren and COTAP is to have the most impact solving climate change. Having the most impact doesn't have to mean you charge the lowest fee - but it does mean removing the most amount of CO2. If charging a higher fee gives Wren a change to reach millions and get them to pay more where COTAP is still tiny and have one-time donations that is a strong argument for why a different model is needed here

Y Combinator funded https://www.pachama.com/ in the batch of YC. They're building a marketplace of carbon credit to enable exactly this. They're hiring for engineering and operations in San Francisco right now https://angel.co/pachama/jobs

The reason I'm so interested in Direct Air Capture is:

- It's primarily a tech solution which allows for scale. If you build one Machine you can build a million. It won't actually require very much space, it need access to cheap energy and abilities to store/sequester the CO2 captured.

- Technology have the benefit that can be optimized and optimized and optimized to the point where the cost is not very high. The less tech the less changes for optimization

- There is a big risk many countries won't meet their responsibility. Getting wealthy democracies onboard is hard enough. We need a scalable way to solve this that doesn't require everyone to help because they prob won't after all

- Any negative emission solution that requires a large land-mass will create other problems (dealing with land-owners etc).

People are. But that's just one bet. There are lots of components in the ecosystem needed to make everything succeed

Yes, you are correct. Cheap energy is the main input to Direct-Air-Capture. Overflow energy from Solar and Wind is a great source of that.

I agree that political action is incredibly important. Carbon tax, carbon incentives etc. I don't believe we need to change our political system in order to stop climate change. And if we had to that would make it far more difficult to do.

Even if countries implemented carbon tax and carbon incentives like many have it doesn't change that we innovation. Modern cheap verification systems, Marketplace's like Nori.com

This is great. We need a verified system where know exactly where each dollar is spend and how many CO2 tons are saved per dollar spent

I love those podcasts. You should all listen to them.

They are right that we have all the technologies we need to reach 1.5 degrees C. However we need massive acceleration of implementation of those technologies. Like a 10x improvement. We're not on track right now.

The reason we need Carbon removal is because most IPCC forecast still assume a large % carbon removal. And it's going to be important for us to get back to 300ppm in atmosphere. The consequences to society of 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees are so massive and costly that we should anything that have a shot at avoiding it.

Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology

This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS.

Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too

I had it on my list. But wanted to include optimistic recommendations

This one is removing CO2 from the atmosphere

We have interest in anything where cost-efficient carbon removal is the goal.

We're not picking technologies at this point since no-one really knows. Personally, I'm more excited about Direct-air-capture than I am about bio-energy with carbon capture for a bunch of reasons. Storing carbon in oceans is also interesting. Whatever path we see as a truly scalable way (like, can you 10000x your prototype and get costs benefits for example)

The Paris Climate models (1.5 degrees and 2 degrees) assumes that we are going have to remove a lot of carbon. This is not an either or - we need to both move to a carbon-free economy and remove carbon

Y Combinator is actively looking for companies working on this. If you are working on this yoiu should consider applying.

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#carbon

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/y-combinator-is...

I'm the YC partner who wrote the RFS and have been pushing this. I also went to the first conference of Negative Emissions in world (I think) in Gothenburg, Sweden last month.

It's clear that much of what is needed for this to work is coming together 1) Research on underground storage is in a great place 2) Climeworks and Carbon engineering + Klaus Lackner are the pioneering companies/researchers working on Direct-Air-capture and they've shown the technology works. 3) California recently/are currently implementing legislation that will allow companies up to $180 per ton carbon removed and sequestered. This should be more than enough to build a business doing this at scale. 4) Perhaps the most important timing question is the fast drop in energy costs driven by solar. Energy is the number once scaling cost-factor if you want to scale this up to have a material impact on the climate. Solar is the obvious choice here since there is barely any scaling costs once installed. California incentives also allows you place your installations anywhere in the world. Mojave desert would be a good place.

What is needed right now is you guys. We need entrepreneurs and founders who want to start companies building both Direct-Air-Capture technology and sequestration technologies. I've met many investors over the last 6 months are looking actively to invest in these projects.

If you are working on these technologies you can email me gustaf@ycombinator.com

Two other great resources here are

http://www.centerforcarbonremoval.org

http://www.airminers.org

I'm convinced that whoever will build the most cost-effective way to remove carbon from the air will both have a shot at a $100B+ market while saving the earth at the same time. What could be more motivating?

Cheap energy is critical to massive carbon removal. I think solar might also be the answer