Diego Saez Gil is the Cofounder and CEO of Pachama, a startup developing the technologies to bring trust, transparency and efficiency to the forest carbon market. His team leverages machine learning to accelerate the validation of carbon captured in reforestation and forest conservation projects. On this episode of the podcast, Diego joins Alexsandra, Ross and Christophe to explain how LiDAR technology works and discuss how Pachama is using it to measure carbon capture with stunning accuracy.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon.
Alexsandra Guerra: I thought I was going to open.
Ross Kenyon: No, no, you can introduce our guest Diego. Diego, did you bring any alfajores for us?
Diego Saez-Gil: No, next time. Sorry, guys.
Ross Kenyon: So disappointed. I have an Argentinian in here. They don’t even bring you alfajores. Okay.
Christophe Jospe: Ross was trying to make him feel at home by cooking steak and totally stunk up the house. Thank you, Ross. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I said chow pibe. That was, that was good enough. A good start. I’ve exhausted all of my, all of my regional knowledge now.
Alexsandra Guerra: I can’t think past the smell.
Ross Kenyon: You can’t think. Oh yeah. I cooked that steak. It really, it wasn’t regenerative either. So I cut you off in your intro, but sorry world.
Alexsandra Guerra: For all the people who are listening to this banter, we’re in Oakland for a big conference and we’re sharing a home right now. Ross cooked steak.
Ross Kenyon: Roomies. Yeah. I think I kind of burned it too. Anyways, why don’t you introduce our guest?
Alexsandra Guerra: Sure. Hi, everybody. This is Alexsandra Guerra from Nori. I’m here with Christophe as well. Christophe Jaspe from Nori. And sitting across from me is Diego Suiskil.
Diego Saez-Gil: Saiskil. Saiskil. Yes, good enough.
Alexsandra Guerra: You just told me. From Pachama. Welcome.
Diego Saez-Gil: Thank you so much for having me.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve been trying to do this for a while. Yeah. And we finally, finally snared you. Although you had to drive a very long time to get here. So we got to make it worth it, guys. This better be good.
Diego Saez-Gil: I’m very excited. Big fan of the podcast.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m feeling a lot of buildup.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: We just need to keep going.
Ross Kenyon: We do. We do. We do. The momentum is slipping. Yeah. It’s been a while since we’ve done three hosts here. Yeah. So Diego, why don’t you start us off and save us from ourselves and explain a little bit about what Pachama is.
Diego Saez-Gil: Sure. Pachama, we are trying to unlock the full potential that forests have as a solution for climate change. You might have read the numbers of the potential that reforestation has as a source of carbon capture, but also the forests that we have standing today have an enormous potential to continue capturing carbon, which they have been doing for billions of years. And it kind of drives me crazy that not only we are not Reforesting at scale, which is such an easy solution, but we’re actually destroying these forests that we have around the planet, like the Amazon rainforest, which is very dear to me because I grew up in Argentina, in the north of Argentina, the last tip of the Amazon ecosystem.
And you might have seen the news, we are deforesting at scale. So what we’re trying to build is first a set of tools to measure and monitor how much carbon a forest captures. Today, we have high definition. Satellite images. We have LiDAR devices that can be put into drones or airplanes to take three-dimensional images of a forest. And we have machine learning algorithms that can analyze the data with a high degree of precision. So we’re Building those tools to make it very transparent and accessible to know exactly how much carbon a forest is capturing.
And then with that help validate carbon offset projects that then can be accessed by carbon buyers in the market.
Alexsandra Guerra: So you mentioned a term here. Let’s define what is LIDAR?
Diego Saez-Gil: LiDAR is a device that effectively shoots a laser towards an environment and then gets the laser back and with that can construct a three-dimensional image of any environment. This is what’s used on Self-driving cars, you might have seen the Google cars driving around here. They are effectively scanning their surroundings with LiDAR. And as a result of self-driving cars, the devices have become cheaper, smaller, Moore’s Law. And that technology can be used to scan a forest and you obtain these beautiful three-dimensional images of a forest that then you can use to know how much biomass is there in a forest and therefore how much carbon.
Christophe Jospe: So basically what it stands for is light detection and ranging, right?
Diego Saez-Gil: There you go.
Christophe Jospe: And what you’re doing is shooting out a photon and getting back that transmission and somehow that transmission can tell you some degree of biomass that creates some amount of reading into the total amount of carbon that’s stored.
Diego Saez-Gil: Exactly.
Christophe Jospe: That’s right?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah. So, and then the cool thing, this is something that’s been around for a long time, started with military usage, you know, then, you know, move on to again, self-driving cars and in forestry is being used for some years, but What was really revolutionary is that now we have deep learning, computer vision, that basically can estimate without you teaching the algorithm what is a tree, you can obtain this incredibly We have incredibly precise measurements of how much biomass and how much carbon is there in a forest. Above ground, of course, you know, it cannot go down to the roots yet, but it gives you an incredibly precise read of the carbon stock of a forest.
Demonstrated that with our models we can achieve less than 1. 5% error with 97% confidence at estimating carbon storage comparing the results of our models with ground truth of the U. S. Forest Service sending people to measure trees with tapes. So that’s the power of these algorithms. Now what we need to do is expand the model to the rest of the world because we train these algorithms in the U. S. where we have really good data and now we’re obtaining data of South America and other parts of the world.
Alexsandra Guerra: That is incredible. We said 1. 5%. Yeah. Yeah. With soil, it’s much more complicated.
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: And so you mentioned your model. You mentioned machine learning. So I’m assuming that within the U. S. and forests, you take into account regions and the different type of vegetation and biomass that you would see there. So because you’re looking from above ground and you’re doing this LIDAR, there might be a higher canopy of trees. And then what happens below that? Is that taken into account?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, I mean, definitely in the Amazon becomes more complicated than in a temperate forest of New England, for example, because you have these multi-layered canopies on a rainforest like that. But still, you can be really good. Again, what the deep learning algorithm model does is that it is training all the time with ground truth, right? And it’s teaching itself, you know, this shape. Contains this amount of carbon and then starts to, you know, apply this to other areas in which it doesn’t have ground truth and it’s good at predicting it.
And then we can apply those algorithms to satellite and in satellite, you know, it identifies basically pixel by pixel and you can predict with that precision, the carbon storage of forest.
Christophe Jospe: So sometimes I hear machine learning and I’m like, oh, I rolled. This person’s just in Silicon Valley trying to raise and use machine learning or blockchain.
Ross Kenyon: That’s general artificial intelligence. That’s the real distant one.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, yeah, sure. AI, ML.
Alexsandra Guerra: They’re two different things and that’s why people roll their eyes.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like people say that machine learning is written in Python and artificial intelligence is written in PowerPoint.
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah. There are lots of fun memes around.
Christophe Jospe: But just to break this down for the layman a little bit, because I think what you’re doing is really cool, and it’s not jargon, it is real. And actually, you’ve calibrated the model through ground truthing so that these machines can learn on top of each other and then run in other places where you don’t need to calibrate it, right? Yeah. And then you’ve got some kind of algorithm that just works. Why should we trust you that the algorithm works?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, Diego.
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, absolutely, because... It is kind of a black box. You know, the Google engineers who develop the program that won Go don’t know how it works. That’s the thing about, you know, kind of like the scary or spooky thing about deep learning. We don’t know how it works. We use convolutional neural networks, which is a particular deep learning technique that basically scan the voxel space of a three-dimensional cloud of points and from there, again, identify the shapes and volumes and then And again, teaches itself by comparing to ground truth. The reason you have to trust us is because the results are there when we compare our models with measurements taken by foresters going to the ground, measuring the halometric equations of a tree and effectively measuring the biomass of a tree in traditional ways.
So the model works because the data tells it. And then it just becomes, you know, how do you expand it? How do you keep it up to date? And so forth.
Ross Kenyon: How is forestry measured right now in terms of either the carbon markets or just in general, in particular in South America? And then what do you change about it? I guess where Pachama is a suite of tools that people can use to verify certain outcomes that are happening within forestry.
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah. So, okay. So we started again from the mission of unlocking forest as a solution to climate change. Then we realized, okay, the problem today is that we’re not funding. Reforestation and forest conservation. When we look at why, we saw that even though carbon markets have an enormous potential, even though Article 5 of the Paris Agreement focused specifically on forest as a solution for climate change and use Carbon markets to drive capital there. There is not that much carbon money going to, carbon markets money going to forest. And when we ask why, we look that today if you want to certify a forest project to obtain carbon credits, It requires sending foresters to the ground, taking samples of plots in a large portion of a forest.
And with that, doing a carbon stock assessment that then needs to be re-evalued every a couple of years.
Unknown speaker: Sounds expensive.
Diego Saez-Gil: And it costs between $100,000 and $400,000, depending on the size of the forest. So as a result of that, there are only 45 projects in North America. All of them are at least 1,000 hectares because smaller wouldn’t make economic sense. And in South America, there are less projects and there are at least 10,000 hectares.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s the same problem that we’re having with Nori with agriculture. That we’re trying to solve the issue of allowing more farmers to participate in a carbon market because what has stopped them is that it’s so expensive for them to get their project verified. And so you’re limited to large projects, people who own and operate over, you know, 50,000 acres. And so what does that do? It leaves out a whole segment of people who could be participating in sequestering carbon.
Diego Saez-Gil: Exactly. Yes. So small landowners are definitely a part of the solution when it comes to nature-based, land-based carbon projects for climate change. So that’s one of the problems we identify. And then we say, okay, well, let’s start building this technology. We see how we apply it. We got all this progress on the ability to measure and monitor forest. And what we’re doing today is we are going to projects that already received carbon credit certificates following the traditional protocols, American Carbon Registry, VCS, Climate Action Reserve, Gold Standard. And what we’re doing is we are going to this project developer saying, hey, we can validate your claims to give you more credibility, to give more transparency and visibility to your project.
And then with that, we can help you increase the chance of selling those carbon credits in voluntary markets. And that’s what we’re doing. So we partner with several project developers in North America and South America.
Ross Kenyon: Because they can’t move these credits because people don’t know if they can trust them and you’re adding trust to the system.
Christophe Jospe: Or are you reducing the transaction costs of what they’re already incurring?
Diego Saez-Gil: Both. So because the other thing that we learned as we went into researching this market is that there were many buyers on voluntary markets that love the idea of forest because, yeah, it’s great. You’re planting trees, you’re protecting ecosystems and so forth and so on. But they didn’t trust them. They were like, oh, there are all these articles that we read on the news about lack of integrity on the calculation of a forest. There’s this problem of permanence. There is a problem of, you know, illegal logging. So we’d rather stay away and we go to something that’s easier to measure, like, for example, methane burning or, you know, solar panels, which are important things.
But, you know, again, forest to me is incredibly important, incredibly scalable and have a lot of benefits I can continue preaching for. And yet, so they were staying away for lack of trust. And we think that by building those tools, by showing that the projects are doing things correctly, that the projects are calculated correctly and that you can monitor them over time, And that’s what we’re doing. And we are then reaching out to companies that are already purchasing carbon offsets or accessing carbon offsets in the market. And we’re presenting this validated by remote sensing technologies forest projects.
In the future, we hope to extend the usage of our tools for the beginning of a project in the verification and the issuance of the credits.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. It sounds like a useful service. Do you generally like the design of how forestry has been set up in carbon markets so far? Do you think anything needs to be changed in the design of Red or Red Plus or other assets?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, we have a lot of ideas of things that should be better. I mean, we think that everything that’s been done so far is really important.
Ross Kenyon: You chose your words wisely, huh?
Diego Saez-Gil: Well, I told you, English is not my first language, so I have a limited dictionary.
Ross Kenyon: Blame it on that, okay.
Diego Saez-Gil: You know, I think that, you know, everyone who’s been working on forest carbon since the beginning of this idea have been doing incredible contributions. There are things that were just not possible because of lack of technology. For example, let’s just give you one specific example. Today you obtain credits and you have to contribute 18% of your credits to a buffer pool for the potential reversal of projects if there is fire or if there is illegal logging. Every project has to contribute the same, 18%. I don’t know how they came out with this number, and I don’t think it’s fair for every project to contribute the same.
Problem is that before we couldn’t know the risk profile of a project, but today with historical satellite data and algorithms that come We predict the risk based on data of fire, of illegal logging, of the impact of climate change on an ecosystem. We can determine a project by project risk profile and based on that, make it work more like an insurance as opposed to just a blanket contribution to a buffer.
Ross Kenyon: That’s awesome. How does this change? Do you have to talk to the registries or who needs to give a stamp of approval to make this happen?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, so I mean, there are all these bodies that create standards and protocols and they’re open to updates and reviews. And we are talking to them and bringing these ideas and bringing the tools, these data tools to propose updates to these protocols. And they’ve been very open. And yeah, we hope that the whole industry can move forward, improving these protocols based on this new technology that we have today.
Alexsandra Guerra: I feel bad. I feel like almost we’re grilling you, but this is just so interesting.
Ross Kenyon: I’m just really curious, yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: And I love what you’re doing. So what does the progress look like for Pachama? How much of the forests in the U. S. have you covered? How many tonnes of carbon sequestration have you been able to validate, etc.?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, I mean, there are things I can talk to and there are things I’d rather not do yet because, again, we’re very early. By the way, this week is our first year anniversary.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yay.
Unknown speaker: Happy birthday. Congratulations.
Diego Saez-Gil: Thank you. I sent an email to the team today about it. So very early days for us.
Unknown speaker: How big is your team?
Diego Saez-Gil: We are seven right now. And yeah, in terms of impact, we, you know, have We have over 10 forest projects that we validated, we onboarded, we did our analysis of, you know, historical biomass, current carbon stock. And these are projects in the U. S. and in Brazil, in Brazil, in the Amazon rainforest. Conservation projects. And we have a pipeline of a lot of projects from around the world that want to participate in this market. And yeah, right now we are trying to go step by step. And again, at the same time, improving our algorithms with better data for the regions that are outside what we already have validated.
Alexsandra Guerra: I have a question, and we do this a lot on Techstars, is we do weekly report outs on our objectives, our results, and then we ask for help. And it just seems like if you’ve got a pipeline of so many people looking to enroll their projects with you guys around the world, it sounds like you might need help somewhere. What do you guys need to be able to do that?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, I think, as I said, data. The more data that we input into our models, the better they become. In terms of data, we need LiDAR data and we need ground truth, right? So these are two main components. So, you know, I am moving all my contacts in South America because sometimes that data lives in governments, sometimes it lives in universities, sometimes in companies. So we’re trying to, you know, onboard that data into our pipeline. So yes, if there is a listener that has data about forests around the world, talk to us.
Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: We have some weird listeners, I think. Maybe someone has that data. We have amazing listeners. Someone’s got that nasa. gov email. I’m sure they have that. The data that you need.
Ross Kenyon: Probably so. What do you make of what’s happening in Brazil? There’s sort of a fight over development versus preservation of the Amazon. And then also one of the big criticisms I’ve seen, particularly from the left with regard to forestry projects, is that oftentimes there’s indigenous people who don’t have land title who live in these forests. And then these like the clean development mechanism projects would get set up and be like, we live here. And they’re like, actually, now this is a... You know, UN project and it’s very lucrative and you need to leave and also tell no one that you lived here.
So like, what are the land politics and also the development politics and what you’re seeing? This is a big, big, I mean, really good question.
Diego Saez-Gil: So we’re talking about the battlefield, the battlefront. The situation is very complicated. I am from South America and I know the complexities of countries in which people have the right to improve their conditions of life. And there is a big economic pressure on natural resources. The reality is that most people in Brazil, in Colombia, in Peru, in Argentina want to protect the forest. There was a survey recently in Brazil, 97% of people don’t want the Amazon to be cut down. Yet there is this story of development looking at nature as resources to exploit.
And that’s a narrative that many politicians are using in South America. And it’s important. And emboldening the ones who don’t care is very complicated. So what we like about carbon markets in connection to forestry and nature-based solutions is that in a way it puts It’s a price and it creates an income for the people in these areas that can be an alternative and hopefully in the future as the price of carbon goes up, it will be a very meaningful alternative to clear-cutting the forest for cattle ranching or whatever. In terms of indigenous communities, incredibly important.
Indigenous communities are the protectors of the forest. They’ve been there for tens of thousands of years and they definitely need to be considered, they need to They need to be the project developers. They need to be the people who are benefiting the most of these programs. And unfortunately, in the beginning of Red Plus and other projects, this wasn’t considered well enough. And that was a problem. And there was a pushback from many indigenous communities. And there were situations, as you said, in which things were not done correctly. Again, with more transparency tools, with less middlemen, more tools for empowering those who are in the forest, this will not happen or will happen less.
So the fact that something was done incorrectly the first time or at the beginning doesn’t mean that it won’t work. So we just need to make it better.
Alexsandra Guerra: Just got to keep trying and use whatever it was that we can learn from the past. Engage those people in making the solutions better because they know better than we do. We’re like coming in and they’re the ones who struggled with the problem. I’m feeling like a total different mood now from when we started because of everything that you were just talking about with regard to the using up of resources and indigenous people protecting lands and just the total consumption of natural resources. And sometimes I say this to the guys all the time.
Sometimes I just need to take a breath and just be like, okay, what does Reversing Climate Change look like? Oh my God. Getting everybody to feel empowered and acting because we can’t do it alone. Like we just need everybody to either keep sharing the podcast, to pay for carbon removal, to look at your website, to send you guys data. Now I’m just kind of rambling here, but these are the themes that I’m seeing constantly pop up every time we talk about the work that we’re doing within climate, within, you know, startups, et cetera.
We have to do this together and we have to leverage what we used in the past and just be a little bit more optimistic or else we are screwed.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I read, have you read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells?
Diego Saez-Gil: I haven’t and I won’t probably.
Alexsandra Guerra: I like that. I’m going to steal that response every time you ask me about a book.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a very, very good answer and very honest too. It’s a great book and Nori tends to be pretty optimistic and solutions oriented. I think you are too. And then reading that book is like in the movies and they’re like, don’t look down. Like, why? What’s down? You look, you’re like, okay. That’s like what I was like, oh, actually the stakes of what we’re doing is they’re very high.
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah. I mean, I definitely think that. It was about time for people to wake up to the reality of this problem. We’re talking about the first real global problem. The first, I mean, yeah, we did have the nuclear missile crisis in the 80s, but this is the first problem that has such momentum that cannot be solved by one single country and that puts in danger civilization as we know it. So yes, we need to wake up to this. You know, we cannot look away from it. That being said, humanity and Mother Earth has faced many other big challenges in the past and we were able to overcome it.
So we will. Now the question is, you know, what it will cost us because there is a price that we’ll have to kind of pay for the credit we’ve been taking.
Alexsandra Guerra: And so in my mind is who’s going to pay for that? And you mentioned earlier that you reach out, you know, you’ve got these projects and you’ll reach out to corporates who are already purchasing or procuring offset projects. And we’re here. So let’s give some context. We’re here in Oakland because our podcast listeners definitely know where we’re at. We’re at Verge 19. It’s starting tomorrow. We’ve had multiple little CRNs on that one. They’ve got a new carbon removal track that they just started this year for their Verge conference. Anyways, and so Green Biz that’s hosting this conference is a media group that focuses on sustainability in the private sector.
So what is it that we’re looking for this week or you’re looking for this week in being here at Verge and engaging this group of individuals and organizations?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that corporations, this is their opportunity to show what they are made of and what they’re made for. They’re made to benefit society. Climate change is the opportunity for capitalism to really... You know, grow up into its full potential, which is benefiting society at large for the long term. So I agree with you. This is a solution for this is going to come from everyone and corporations have to play a very You heard it here first on the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Unknown speaker: I’m curious.
Christophe Jospe: But Alexsandra, you’re like breathing into the mic, so you should take your follow-up there.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m sorry. You just served something up for me at Diego. So I’m going to be pitching on stage for the Verge Accelerate pitch competition. And I have a very similar message as to getting the audience to Those sustainability managers at these corporations to think beyond just emissions reductions because too little, too late to think that can solve our problem. And if we’re going to meet our UN goals of net zero carbon by 2050 and just prevent complete disaster, we have to emit less and remove the rest. So if they don’t have the resources to do it, carbon markets are what allow them to do that in a way that Guarantees the carbon removal that they pay for happens and that they can verify that information.
So the work that you and Nori and other groups are doing, other groups that we’ve actually had on CRN too, is super important. And When I say that and I think about pitch, the accelerate pitch, like, oh yeah, all these startups are getting up there and we have to compete. And I’m so over that. It’s like, this is not a competition. Literally, all of us deserve to win. We are all breaking our backs, bootstrapping companies, working on solutions because we know that it needs to happen. I really hope that if you, you know, go to the Verge Accelerate and there’s like a voting, like there are a bunch of videos, listeners, and just support these startups because we need you so much.
Diego Saez-Gil: Absolutely. Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Diego has been a, you’ve, you’ve extended your hand in friendship more times than you had to. It’s good where we try to do the same too. It’s also just more fun that way.
Diego Saez-Gil: Absolutely. I mean, we need more entrepreneurs working on this. I encourage any founder who already did a company and have experience building companies to jump into some solutions to climate change. There is so much to do that we need more, more entrepreneurs working on this.
Christophe Jospe: So we didn’t get to introduce you up front, but listener, for the record, Diego has a picture of himself on his phone hugging a tree. So he is a certified tree hugger. He actually lives in the forest. But also, Pachama recently graduated from Y Combinator. And you’re a two-time Y Combinator alum. So you sort of know what you’re doing when it comes to creating companies. But I’m curious to know the path that led you to where you are now in building up Pajama. And also, specifically, your experience as an entrepreneur and what you bring as an entrepreneur or fresh injection of new ideas into a much-needed space.
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, thank you. You know, my personal story, I grew up in Argentina, in the north, in the Yungas, which is a union between the rainforest and the Andes. After I finished school, I went to Barcelona to do a master’s degree. And then I came to the U. S. to do an internship in New York City and decided to become an entrepreneur. Since I was a kid, I was an environmentalist and I loved nature. But somehow here, I just needed to be successful, needed to create a company. I bought into the American dream, right?
And I started a company in the travel space, which was my passion at the time as well. And I did two companies. In these two companies, I definitely learned a lot through successes, but mostly through failures, crashing and burning several times. With the second company I did, I got into YC and I moved to California and I learned a lot. Definitely those guys have founded so many companies that started realizing patterns, common mistakes of founders. After my last company exited and it was under a very difficult situation, I decided to take some time off.
I took a year and a half of sabbatical to really think what I wanted to do next. In this year and a half, I did a lot of soul searching. I went to the Amazon rainforest, spent some time with some native communities there, got incredibly inspired by the power of nature, and also got incredibly shocked by the deforestation I was seeing on the borders of the Amazon. I came back. I was in New York at the time and decided to move to California, but not to San Francisco to the forest.
And I got a house here in the Santa Cruz mountains. And from there, from a little deck that I have among the redwoods, I started thinking ideas for my next I read a lot of books and ended up realizing that all the things, all the techniques, all the playbooks that Silicon Valley has developed to scale up technologies and solutions that can go in a few years from just a few black cars in San Francisco to Uber, the same techniques can be used to solve climate change. And that was my intention on bringing those experiences as a founder to this world.
Christophe Jospe: Great. I love that response. And that sort of cues up a follow-up. We were talking before about kind of the scarcity mindset that has existed, particularly around climate change too. You get like these weird fiefdoms of schools of thought and you must think one way and sort of shame, shame, shame on you if you don’t. And then also within carbon markets, traditionally, at least we found a lot of friction or resistance to new ideas that might reduce transaction costs and create more transparency and part of the motivation for Nori. Which, by the way, Pachama, we’re excited to work with you when we’re ready.
For sure. We’re not there yet. But like, I mean, if it weren’t obvious to the listener, it’s pretty obvious to us here. Like, yeah. There is a partnership between us. Help people get paid to remove carbon and we need to work with data platforms and you’ve built a really good one. However, I do think there is a scarcity mindset as opposed to the abundance mindset, which is like, hey, humans, like here we are just trying to figure out this planet so we don’t screw it up for the next generations and generations beyond that.
But how have you seen that mindset play out in your work?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, I mean, we were talking before the podcast started about this quote from Einstein I like a lot that might or might not be from Einstein. We never know today on the internet. But that the consciousness that created a problem is not going to be the same consciousness that will solve the problem. So the consciousness that created this problem is the consciousness of scarcity, which is ingrained on the type of capitalism that is hopefully fading away. The consciousness that is going to get us out of this problem is this consciousness of abundance, is a consciousness We are all interconnected and we all have to build together using the human hive mind, the solutions that are multifaceted and that takes a lot of different experimentation to actually solve it at scale and on time.
Alexsandra Guerra: What you said earlier was really interesting. Talking about corporations, you said that they’re here to build things that benefit society or human race. And I thought, yeah, I would love that to be the truth. And I think that’s more with an abundance mindset. And unfortunately, we’ve seen mostly the scarcity set in, which rolls out as, you know, we have to increase profits for the investors, for certain subset of people. And there’s nothing wrong with getting rich. I don’t believe that. It’s just a matter of like at what cost? So are we going to be considering the total impact?
Are we going to be looking at how do we totally redesign our business model to go from linear? To circular and regenerative. So not even circular, but just regenerative. Working with other partners and working within your supply chain and your distributors and saying, okay, what are the problems that you face? How can we make that better? And then looking at the whole overall That’s true abundance. And I love that you mentioned it when you came in like, oh, it’s all about abundance and scarcity. And that’s the problem that, or the issue that we’re facing right now with climate change.
And it even goes down to like an individual level. Myself, we talked about the pitch stage and competing, like no abundance, everybody gets to win. And then everybody gets a chance to feel valued and involved because that’s the world that we live in and we should There’s an infinite amount of love and beauty in the world. And just because someone is doing well over here does not mean that you aren’t doing well. Unfortunately, I feel like that sets in with a lot of companies.
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah. And in fact, I think that this is a beautiful opportunity for all humanity to come together inspired by one mission and for each person to contribute their gifts, whether your gift is storytelling, building technology, Rallying people, you know, changing the ways that things are done. Everyone has something to contribute on. Again, solving one of the biggest challenges of our generation that can also bring us to a utopia, really. I think that, you know, what like Mr. Fuller used to say, that we are in front of oblivion or utopia. That’s the reality of our generation, I think.
And I think it’s inspiring, too, to think that we can all work together for that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. You Love Earth and Human Hands, David Grinspoon.
Diego Saez-Gil: That’s right.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. We love him. It’s maybe my personal favorite episode. Why would you say that on air? Can I say that? Maybe I’ll cut it. I want to just hear like, why did that book make such an impression? A lot of what you’re saying about this being a make or break moment for humanity sounds Grinspoonian to me. Yeah. What’s the connection there with that?
Diego Saez-Gil: I mean, that book was definitely part of the inspiration for this company. I loved his big picture of view of humanity as, you know, just one of the many species that change Earth. Right. Before the bacteria see it, the plants see it. And in looking at the earth from this, you know, very high level viewpoint. And I also loved his optimism, you know, because I deeply believe that humanity Humans are awesome and that we have the ability to be the stores, the Rangers of Planet Earth. So yeah, that book was super inspiring.
I also, I’m a big fan of, of course, Carl Sagan, Lynn Margolis and all the James Lovelock and all the awesome people he quotes a lot in that book.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I wish that was more present in the environmental space because I also find it very inspiring. Basically, what it usually boils down to for me, and if you’ve listened to that Grinspoon episode, we go through this at length, but Right. Right. And then like you have these like what happens when you get to a point where humanity or an intelligent species develops the technology to transform the planet but not the institutions to govern the technology in a productive way.
Diego Saez-Gil: Right.
Ross Kenyon: How many civilizations across the universe have gotten to where we are right now and have killed themselves before they figured it out? Right.
Alexsandra Guerra: Isn’t that crazy? Yeah. I think about that all the time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Like what do we do with that? I don’t know.
Alexsandra Guerra: And there’s another book we, you know, Ross, as you can tell listeners, is super intellectual and reads all these books. And I’m like a little bit more, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: That’s all yourself short.
Alexsandra Guerra: I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I’m a little different. And I love Eckhart Tolle. We talked about this, I think when Eric Kornacki was on the podcast and in his book, The New Earth Awakening. Did you read that one?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, I love it.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh my gosh. So when he opens that book in chapter one or the introduction, I don’t even remember, it doesn’t matter, but he talks about evolution in this way. Maybe not eukaryotic or prokaryotic breakdowns, but like imagine that there was all this vegetation and then there was a flower. Like there had to be a first flower. How long did it bloom? 20 seconds. And the next one came. Maybe was it a minute? And then it evolves. And it’s all because of some type of pressure constraints that led to that evolution.
Same thing with like water, living animals. Okay, well then it must have been living in a section of water that was cut off from the rest of the ocean and then slowly receded over thousands of years. So then developed lungs, then developed feet and like went on land slowly, slowly, slowly. And he mentions, now I’m talking, I’m going long, but I really love this. And it’s to this point of scarcity and abundance and like what really needs to happen in order to change. I don’t think it’s just technology. I think it’s technology change driven by a change of like just awareness and Yeah, I love it.
Diego Saez-Gil: And I think that He talks a lot in that book about the ego. I mean, that’s the problem. We’ve been, you know, just running around trying to, again, scarcity mindset, you know, protect our own selves without realizing that we’re all deeply interconnected, all human beings and with all forms of life. So I think that is a big consciousness shift that is happening. I see it happening. It hasn’t arrived to Bolsonaro and to Trump yet, but it’s going to arrive.
Alexsandra Guerra: But it’s totally happening because we’re talking about it. And you’re probably the third or fourth person I know that’s mentioned that I’ve been able to talk about Eckhart Tolle. It helps when Oprah is such a big fan and just continuously pushes Eckhart Tolle for over a decade now. But yeah, I think it is happening.
Christophe Jospe: Welcome to the bay, Alexsandra. These are the sorts of conversations.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s why I love being here. So Paul, our CEO, doesn’t really love it. And I’m like, Sammy, we got to go to San Francisco. I’m going. I’m going. Like, what do you need? If it’s just for an hour, I’ll go. I miss it.
Christophe Jospe: All right. Well, we’re getting to the top of the hour. And I’ve quite enjoyed this podcast. But if the listeners want to get more engaged with Pachama or connect with you or learn more, what can they do?
Diego Saez-Gil: Yeah, Pachama.com is our website on Twitter, Pachama Inc. And if you email info at Pachama, I get this email and almost everyone on the team, I think. And yes, we are going to be looking to expand our team. With talented, passionate people that wants to work on this mission. If you are a forest owner that wants to participate in this market, we might not be quite ready yet, but come to us. If you are a company that wants to offset your emissions with a forest carbon, come talk to us.
If you have data about forest, come talk to us. And yeah, those are the places to find us.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening and you’re looking for a job in carbon removal or carbon removal adjacent companies, you should look at Pachama. Also, I charge a very modest finder’s fee, two points under average, which is 8% yearly salary. No, Diego, thanks for being here. And I’m so glad our paths have been intersecting so much. We’re looking forward to finding ways that we can work together on stuff in the future. I’m pretty sure we’re going to find it.
Diego Saez-Gil: Absolutely. Yes. Rooting for you guys big time. So excited to see you guys on Techstars and looking forward to see what keeps coming from you guys and definitely will find ways to collaborate.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thank you.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you so much for coming.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Do you want to take us out and tell people to rate and review us?
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, yeah. If you like what you hear and you’re not too annoyed, please support us. Rate and review this podcast. Say something nice. And we really appreciate your support.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. Goodbye now.
