#189
Guest: Taylor Francis, co-founder of Watershed
One day when he was 13, Taylor Francis walked out of the movie theater, and he was pissed off. He had just seen Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and internalized a “generational call to arms, that my parents had screwed our generation” by causing the climate crisis, he says. 14 years later, he was working at Stripe and felt another call to arms: The 2020s would be a crucial decade for slashing carbon emissions and combating global warming. So, he and his co-founders Avi Itskovich and Christian Anderson all left Stripe to start Watershed, which helps companies measure and reduce their emissions.
In this episode, Taylor and Joubin discuss Patrick Collison, Dan Miller-Smith, hiring challenges, Jonathan Neman, “golden age syndrome,” John Doerr and Mike Moritz, the Climate Reality Project, steady partnerships, DRI cultures, shared context, social distancing, information sprawl, and the founders’ “woe is me” narrative.
Chapters:
01:02 Magnetic missions
06:40 How enterprise sustainability works
08:40 Watershed’s first client, Sweetgreen
11:04 Reflecting on the early days
16:36 Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth
18:53 Mobilizing teenagers
22:16 The origins of Watershed
27:04 Leaving Stripe and raising money
31:41 Interchangeable co-founders
33:06 The ground truth
35:25 The Dunbar Number
38:22 Watershed’s operating principles
41:56 Intensity, priorities, and sacrifice
47:37 Moving faster
50:26 Sustainability is a part of business
52:21 The topology of emissions
58:08 Who Watershed is hiring
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