Inevitable Ep 120: Nan Ransohoff & Ryan Orbuch, Stripe Climate Team
Today's guests are Nan Ransohoff & Ryan Orbuch, members of Stripe’s Climate team.
Nan and Ryan work on the Climate team at Stripe, and I was very excited for the opportunity to interview them. While it’s not a climate company, Stripe recognizes that climate change poses a long term risk to its mission of growing the GDP of the Internet. As a result, Stripe is doing a number of things that I think are fascinating. For one, it’s treating the climate team like a product team. The company embraces a culture of experimentation and, as part of that, it’s leaning into negative emissions. The company has been transparent in its efforts, open sourcing much of its work. Second, Stripe is figuring out how to include merchants in its efforts to decarbonize. I can't wait to see what Stripe does in climate over time. It's a fascinating company, and a great discussion.
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
In today’s discussion, we cover:
- Nan’s and Ryan’s respective backgrounds and how it lead them to climate.
- What is Stripe and its mission?
- Stripe’s negative emissions commitment.
- How did Stripe go about learning about climate?
- The Stripe Climate team and how it operates.
- Purchasing an offset vs. a negative emission.
- Stripe’s project purchases and its selection process.
- How Stripe thinks of the policy landscape and its role in it.
- How much focus is spent on helping other businesses with negative emissions and reducing its own emissions.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
- Stripe’s 2019 negative emissions announcement: https://stripe.com/blog/negative-emissions-commitment
- Ryan’s climate blog post (lists project purchases): https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
- 45Q Tax Credit: https://www.betterenergy.org/blog/primer-section-45q-tax-credit-for-carbon-capture-projects/
- Stripe Negative Emissions Source Material on Github: https://github.com/stripe/negative-emissions-source-materials
- Stripe is looking to add a designer and operations manager to the climate team: climate@stripe.com
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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant