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Introducing the Carbon Industry Framework

November 2, 2020 Leave a Comment

Over the past 4 months as I’ve been diving deeper into the world of Climate Change…reading, researching, discussing, and learning a lot more about Climate Change solutions. I quickly found myself searching for a way to organize all the companies and solutions that I was coming across based on the impact areas where their work could be applied. This organizational need came out of my 2 decades of dealing with industry reports, maps, and analysis. What I was searching for was a framework to help get a picture of the companies working to remove all the CO2 that we’ve put into our environment, the CO2 that is the leading cause of climate change.

Eventually I created this Framework to describe the Carbon Industry…the collection of companies’ with the ultimate goal of addressing climate change. With the help of a few people within the AirMiners community and some outside of that community, I refined the framework. Now I’m publishing the first draft for additional feedback and evolution:

The goal for this Framework is to provide a reference to the Carbon Industry to guide investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs to quickly understand or describe where a specific company is focused on across the the landscape of Sectors working to address climate change.

After you watch the video introduction I look forward to hearing your feedback, there are a few specific areas for feedback that I call out at the end. If you’re a member of the AirMiner’s slack channel, you can post comments on the thread there. Otherwise, please comment here in accordance to my comment policy.

11/3/20 Update: A PDF version of the Carbon Industry Framework Introduction is now available for download.

Researching Distribute Direct Air Capture (DDAC)

August 9, 2020 Leave a Comment

After a long hiatus from the blog, providing a quick update as a historical record on a side project of mine.

A little under 2 years ago I was reading articles about climate change, proposed solutions, and active removal of carbon from our atmosphere. A friend of mine has a background in chemical engineering and happens to have spent most of his career working to remove carbon (and other pollutants) from the waste stream of industrial plants. During an evening around the back yard fire pit I started asking him about the science behind this and it started my problem solving mind running. Eventually leading me to the thesis that the way to tackle this problem at scale and in the timeframe needed (the next 10 years or less) was to build a network of distributed Direct Air Capture (DDAC) systems that could be retrofitted onto existing global infrastructure such that we were actively removing CO2 from our atmosphere in small bites (<1MT/year) all around the world and piggy backing the opex on the existing infrastructure.

Some structure was put around this concept and initial research was started. Shortly after, a new leadership role was also started at Informatica. Which essentially paused all the side project research.

Fast forward 2 years and we find ourselves in a much different world and I find myself with time to be devoted to the side project again. So what has changed in the past 2 years? Simply put, and scary, the world is falling behind on the climate change problem. The models of climate change are being proven to have been way to conservative. And the United States specifically…well, there too many current issues there to list. And now I agree with others that we will need multiple solutions pulling CO2 from the atmosphere all working together to fix this.

But, there is some positive aspects that have occured over my 2 year hiatus. The people who understand and believe the science have also swelled at the ground level. And luckily these people are problem solvers. When forced to stay at home during a pandemic, problem solves don’t spend all their time binge watching Netflix but invest that time to work on solving the biggest problem facing humanity. A whole community, AirMiners, has been formed around just active carbon removal from the atmosphere. And so much information is being shared that by so many smart people, that 25% of the problem I was facing before with my initial research…finding readings to education myself and people to speed that learning process…has now been fixed.

So I’m off and running again on my initial research. The general idea remains the same, but now there are so many other companies that have started on different pieces of the DDAC system that I have in mind, that I can focus my energy on the areas I can provide the most value: designing a distributed solution to a big problem, building a business model that supports that solution.

Unlike other technology products that I’ve been involved in bringing to market in the past, this carbon removal community realizes that this isn’t about building the next unicorn company, it’s bigger than that. It’s about saving the planet for humanity’s future. Thus, I’m thankful for all the people who are smarter than me who are helping speed my education here (these are many broad and deep topic areas involved). And I plan on recognizing all those who help along the way here and share more details of my personal journey in the near future.

Friday Find: Data, Culture, Investing, and China

September 21, 2018 Leave a Comment

Friday Find is my collection of interesting articles that I felt worth sharing from the week. An increasing amount of my personal research focus lately has been around Data and how companies are using data to enable change as well as the cultural change needed within a company to support this data evolution. This is an natural movement up the stack from the IoT / Connected Device infrastructure work I have been doing for the past 3 years.

As a company grows from small to large and evolves, there are, in fact, no more than two things it must do:
1. Upgrade its algorithms to process data
2. Get more data

Li Guofei’s article A Total Rethinking of Tencent’s Strategy
Translated in Jeff Ding’s ChinAI Newsletter

This quote comes from an interest article out of China (via Jeff Ding’s ChinAI Newsletter). I find Jeff’s newsletter and this article interesting as part of my investing focus on Chinese companies. But the article explains clearly a number of general aspects around data, like the impact that information overload has:

In the era of information overload, the search efficiency of “people in search of information” continues to decline, and the distribution method of “information in search of people” has become more popular. Good algorithms can improve the precision of content distribution and increase user stickiness, thus significantly improving the ability of the advertisement to be converted (into sales/cash).
Li Guofei’s article A Total Rethinking of Tencent’s Strategy
Translated in Jeff Ding’s ChinAI Newsletter

We all encounter this daily in our lives, unless you don’t use Facebook, Google Search, or a growling list of free services; remember, if you’re not paying for the product…you (or your data) are the product.

But the flip side of this is how to effectively use data for maximum [cost effective] results in our businesses. For larger enterprises, this is an evolution of thinking and operating that can’t be driven from the top down but enabled and supported from the top with bottom up adoption. Something that a recent McKinsey article on Why Data Culture Matters covered.

The experience of these leaders, and our own, suggests that you can’t import data culture and you can’t impose it. Most of all, you can’t segregate it. You develop a data culture by moving beyond specialists and skunkworks, with the goal of achieving deep business engagement, creating employee pull, and cultivating a sense of purpose, so that data can support your operations instead of the other way around.
Why Data Culture Matters
McKinsey Quarterly

I saw this first hand at one of my clients where I helped them implement a big data as a service offering on their private cloud (I was representing the private cloud vendor). There was a general consensus from leadership that big data was key to the company, a research project was lead by IT to understand who was doing that today down at the BU level, that feed into spinning up a private cloud service to make it easier and cheaper for the current BU’s doing big data, with the longer term goal being that others could learn from these examples and quickly and cheaply experiment with big data in their own BUs. Unfortunately, I stopped working with that client before I could see if that longer term vision was ever realized (when I left, they were not investing in the enablement infrastructure for that vision).

What has been your exposure to big data usage and strategy within your organization? Leave a comment on how what you’re seeing/experiencing relates to the above aspects of big data and data culture.