The Pursuit of Scrappiness #29 Merit Valdsalu 🇪🇪 (Single.Earth) on Climate Tech opportunities, raising $7.9M to tokenize world’s forests and lessons learned in Pipedrive
Merit Valdsalu is the Co-founder and CEO of Single.Earth, a revolutionary blockchain-based ecosystem of earth’s carbon sequestration and biodiversity monitoring, tokenization, and trade. Before starting this highly ambitious project, Merit led localization efforts at the Estonian unicorn Pipedrive.
In this fascinating conversation, we talk about the need to digitize the earth’s nature and create a transparent, reliable, and efficient marketplace for trading carbon credits. We also discuss the business potential of the ClimateTech industry, economic and other motivations for nature preservation as well as overall fundraising and entrepreneurship lessons from Merit’s career at Pipedrive and Single.Earth.
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[01:20] - INTRODUCTION AND THE ORIGINS OF SINGLE.EARTH
- Landowners only make money when natural resources are depleted
- Pursuing a passion for the environment
- Planning and implementing a global paradigm-shifting project
- A digital twin of the earth’s nature in open source
- Simplifying and opening the global voluntary carbon trade
- Voluntary vs mandatory carbon markets
[17:10] - ON BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMIC MODELS FOR NATURE PRESERVATION
- Trust and verification provided by blockchain
- Using investors to replace the insufficient demand for voluntary carbon credits
- State of the project and token sale
- Affordable cost of decreasing the carbon footprint
[27:20] - ON CLIMATE TECH INDUSTRY AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
- The opportunities for starting a cleantech company
- General public attitudes towards nature and environment
- Can Western societies even make a difference
- Balancing emissions and nature sequestration
- Who owns the land and owner engagement
- No business models for preserving only for regenerating nature
[45:55] - FUNDRAISING FOR A CLIMATE TECH PROJECT
- The abundance of investors looking at sustainability projects
- Not only impact investors, but also general big VCs hot for this market
- What investors look for in impact businesses
- Having a big name VC on your ticket
[56:50] - OVERALL ENTREPRENEURSHIP LESSONS
- Putting people first
- Creating a culture of enjoying work
- Access to talent
- Mental health
- Choosing the right investors
To reach out to Merit use:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merit-valdsalu/
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
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Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/