Emotional lessons learned from cofounding the Nori carbon dioxide removal marketplace
Could being an emotionally well-regulated person actually help you restore a livable climate?!
This is a summary of episode #401 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your shows, and also the episode in its entirety right below this paragraph. Enjoy!
Quick Takeaways
Ale traced her startup dysfunction back to childhood trauma. A father who left, a mother who told her to stop crying, and a lifetime of performing for love that should have just been there. At Nori, this showed up as imposter syndrome, hero complex, sensitivity to feedback, and burnout… each one feeding the next.
The emotional stuff that founders dismiss as “woo” is often what’s actually holding companies back. Ale saw fires at Nori that nobody else saw, but stayed quiet because she felt like an imposter. The rest of the team didn’t have the empathy skills to ask what was going on. Business solutions alone couldn’t fix what were fundamentally emotional problems.
Ross’s most commonly given piece of business advice is to go to therapy. Unless founders have a grip on their emotional patterns, there will be dysfunction that causes poor decision making. It’s not an issue of being smart, because otherwise they would have already fixed it.
Compulsive achievement is often a trauma response. Ale argues that much of the ambition that drives founders to quit their jobs, risk everything, and work without pay is rooted in trying to fill an inner hole of unworthiness. Gabriel Maté’s work on authenticity vs. connection is relevant here: children will sacrifice authenticity to maintain connection, and that pattern follows people into their companies.
Therapy and coaching serve different functions. Ale had both at the same time while at Nori. The therapist helped her uncover the root patterns. The coach took that distilled information and said “now what?”—turning insight into action. Both are valuable, and they’re not interchangeable.
The patriarchy they’re discussing isn’t about men. It’s about systems. Hierarchical, status-driven, zero-sum structures that reward performance over authenticity and make it nearly impossible to bring emotional work into professional life. Until founders recognize the system they’re swimming in, they can’t choose something different.
Nori’s business model failed, but the mission didn’t. Seven co-founders, blockchain-based carbon removal credits, a two-sided marketplace that was also a registry, and a stack of contrarian bets that all had to hit simultaneously. The “ultimate parlay bet.” But the podcast, the community, and the pioneering work in carbon removal had lasting impact that outlived the company.
Ross admits Ale was right the whole time about the importance of emotional intelligence at work. He used to dismiss her approach as too touchy-feely. Over time, he’s drifted much closer to her view that healthy, sustainable businesses require emotional awareness, not just strategic thinking.
LinkedIn culture rewards performance signaling, not vulnerability. Ale’s post about Nori closing got 500 likes. Her posts about founder burnout get crickets. But the “LinkedIn lurkers” (people who read but don’t engage publicly because they don’t want their boss seeing it), share those posts privately in DMs and become clients.
Ale now coaches purpose-driven founders through Calming Chaos. Her approach combines emotional processing with systems and structure—what she calls the balance of “structure and flow.” She helps founders stuck in burnout, co-founder conflict, indecision, and procrastination find aligned action rooted in purpose rather than performance.
She Was Right the Whole Time
There’s a particular kind of conversation you can only have with someone after enough time has passed that you can both be honest about what went wrong. This is one of those conversations.
The “walking Hallmark card”
Alexsandra “Ale” Guerra was my co-founder at Nori. Her voice was literally the intro to this podcast for years. She’s an Ivy League–educated environmental engineer who helped pioneer carbon removal credits before most people knew what that meant. She also called herself a “walking Hallmark card”, and I’ll confess that at the time, I kind of agreed with her critics more than with her.
She was the emotional one. The one who talked about feelings at work. The one who, when the rest of us were heads-down on strategy and product, would try to surface something about team dynamics or psychological safety and get met with, at best, polite tolerance. I didn’t understand what she was doing. I thought the business problems needed business solutions.
I was wrong about that, and this episode is partly me saying so on the record.
The spiral
Ale laid out her pattern at Nori with a clarity that only comes from years of reflection and therapy. It started with imposter syndrome—she didn’t feel confident, so when she saw problems, she assumed everyone else already knew about them and stayed quiet. Then she played the hero, volunteering for work nobody else was doing because she felt she had to earn her place. That meant taking on more than she could handle, which made her an unreliable partner, which led to feedback about where she was falling short, which felt devastating because couldn’t they see how self-sacrificing she was being? And then burnout, which made her a shell of herself and unable to contribute at all.
Each stage fed the next. And the solution to none of them was a business reorganization or a new hire. The solution was understanding why she was doing it in the first place.
The ballet recital
She traced it back to a ballet recital where every kid had parents with flowers, and she was in tears because her father wasn’t there. He’d left when she was a toddler and married a 23-year-old months later. The message she internalized: you’re replaceable, and if you just perform well enough, maybe the people who are supposed to love you will show up.
That pattern followed her everywhere: into relationships with avoidantly-attached men, into a startup where she made herself smaller to keep the peace, into a dynamic where she never expressed her needs because her mother had taught her that being sad was ruining everything. She told a story about being a kid at Kmart and telling her mother that sometimes she just needs to be sad, and if she’s allowed to feel it, she’ll be okay. Her mom left her in the garden section to cry alone. She dried her eyes and found her family in the toy aisle.
Gabriel Maté’s framework is relevant here: children will sacrifice their authenticity to maintain connection, because connection is survival. But being inauthentic creates chronic stress that shows up in every part of your life, including your startup.
My version
I did my version too, because it would be dishonest not to. Everyone compliments how well-read I am. What they don’t see is the chronic malinvestment—always reading, never quiet, using knowledge acquisition as a way to never sit with myself. The diminishing returns of cramming more information into my brain versus the increasing returns of cultivating wisdom, presence, and the ability to listen to my gut.
I got talked out of gut decisions at Nori because I couldn’t articulate them analytically and in the right socio-linguistic format, or I carried those feelings with caution and would sometimes allow myself to be overruled in places where I did not deeply doubt my intuition. I look back on those moments and wish I’d stood my ground. And I was closed off enough emotionally that someone like Ale—who could read a room better than anyone I’ve worked with—couldn’t actually reach me. I was good at tamping it down. It took years to realize that wasn’t a strength. It was a very tricky middle ground between two paradigms.
Go to therapy
My most commonly given piece of business advice, genuinely, is to go to therapy. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t make for a great LinkedIn post. But when I’m working with founders and I ask how a decision felt and their eyes water, that’s not a strategy problem. That’s a person who needs to understand their own patterns before they can lead effectively.
Ale makes the distinction between therapy and coaching: the therapist helps you uncover the root patterns, and the coach takes that distilled understanding and turns it into forward motion. She had both simultaneously at Nori and recommends the combination. I think some therapists can do both, but they are different skill sets, and having separate people for each is probably better.
The system we’re swimming in
We talked about patriarchy, and Ale was careful to define it: not men, but hierarchical, status-driven, zero-sum systems that reward performance over authenticity. The fish-in-the-ocean problem—you can’t choose differently until you recognize the water you’re swimming in.
This connects to why the people running the highest levels of government and business are often poorly adjusted. It’s hard to become a billionaire without making spiritual trade-offs. The choices required to accumulate that much power and wealth tend to select for people who are filling a hole rather than building from wholeness. Ale frames it as a trauma response: achieving to prove worthiness, seeking power to feel complete.
She’s not saying wealthy people are bad. She’s saying the ultra-high-achiever path often runs through a place of deep misalignment, and if you don’t address what’s driving the achievement, it catches up with you eventually.
The mango tree
Ale lives in South Florida and has a mango tree in her backyard. It took years to bear fruit. The seed goes in the ground, takes months to sprout, survives the elements, becomes a sapling, grows into a tree, and eventually… years later… produces mangoes. Now it’s huge and abundant.
She used this as an analogy for what’s wrong with venture-backed startups trying to scale like Uber when the underlying work (nature restoration, carbon sequestration, building trust with communities) operates on biological timescales. Nori tried to scale a carbon credit marketplace like a tech platform, but carbon takes decades to sequester. The mismatch between venture expectations and natural reality was built into the model.
Her advice now: let the mango seed take root. Test one thing. Iterate. Build from a place of alignment rather than a place of running from ghosts.
Nori didn’t fail
Ale’s best-performing LinkedIn post ever of 500 likes was the one announcing that Nori closed. In the comments, people wrote that Nori was a pioneer, that it pushed the carbon removal space forward, that it mattered. The podcast alone has been a gateway for hundreds of people entering the field.
The business model failed. Seven co-founders, blockchain integration, a two-sided marketplace that was also a registry, and what I typically call the ultimate parlay bet—so many contrarian bets stacked on top of each other that if any single one didn’t hit, the whole thing collapsed. “Double mumbo jumbo” as I put it, borrowing from the screenwriting book Save the Cat: you can have werewolves or time travelers, but not time-traveling werewolves. Nori was nothing but time-traveling werewolves.
But the mission didn’t fail. The community didn’t fail. The relationships didn’t fail. And the things we learned painfully, slowly, through exactly the kind of emotional dysfunction we’re describing, are what make both of us better at what we do now.
Entrepreneurship is a spiritual process
Ale said this on podcasts while we were still running Nori, and I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted the answer to be economic incentives, technology, market design. And those things matter. But the longer I stare at why humans behave as though they don’t want to stay on this planet, the more I think what we need is deeper than technocratic solutions.
Ale’s thesis is that if founders could heal their inner clawing for external validation and feel whole, feel worthy, feel connected, then the things they’d build would be more regenerative, more sustainable, more compassionate, more attuned to community impact. Less ego-driven, less performance-driven. And that’s how you actually reverse climate change: you build from that state.
I used to roll my eyes at this. She was right the whole time.
Transcript
Ross Kenyon: I’m so excited. I can’t believe we’re doing this. Thanks for being here, Ale.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you for having me, Ross. Reversing Climate Change podcast. Wow. It’s like a flashback for me.
Ross Kenyon: No, you’ve been on as a guest. You’ve guest hosted a bunch, but it’s deep in the catalog at this point.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, definitely. My voice used to be the intro.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s true. So if you recognize it and you didn’t know the context of it, yes, that was Ale.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Where to even begin with this. I’m going to ask you, I’m going to take the pressure off of me by asking you, Ale, where do we start to even dive into a topic as robust as this.
Alexsandra Guerra: Are we clear on the topic?
Ross Kenyon: No, I’m hoping you can, if you define it for me, I can prepare, I can save myself from poor organization.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, so the thing that’s been top of mind for me that you and I have been connecting with over many voice notes back and forth—we’re the type of people who send ten minute voice notes. Ten minutes. And I’m listening there with notes of like, at this point and this point.
Ross Kenyon: Me too. A lot of that.
Alexsandra Guerra: I love it though. I love our friendship. So the thing that has been top of mind that we’ve been chatting about is our journey as founders and what we’re seeing. Because I coach founders, you’re mentoring founders as well. And we have our seven year experience of founding Nori and operating. And it’s like for me, what are all the things people are not talking about because it’s ugly or just not a status or performance signal that people want to talk about. And those things that we don’t talk about are exactly what’s holding back so much beautiful innovation on the things that we need to be innovating on today.
Ross Kenyon: I think you’re absolutely right about that, and oftentimes when I’m either coaching accelerators or mentoring somewhere else, or whenever I’m working with startup founders, there are many questions that I will ask that will start with, well, what’s the story that’s being told about this? Is this differentiated? What’s the strategic motivation for this? How can we turn this to best effect? But sometimes if you ask a couple questions beyond that, and especially if there’s been a wrong turn, there will be some questions like, well, how did you come to this decision? And you’ll get some answer that will have more emotional content than what preceded it. And if you even just ask a very basic question like how did it feel to make that decision? Sometimes you can see the eyes water a little bit. You can see something start to unlock. And what’s funny about those sessions too, this is more of a meta comment, but I don’t know if you know this, but sometimes I’ll ask a one sentence question like that and they’ll report back to me and be like, that was an amazing session. Thank you so much. I basically just asked a question.
Alexsandra Guerra: Good coaching. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Let you explore the emotional content of why you made this maybe suboptimal decision. Do you have that experience, like I barely did anything?
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because that’s what good coaches do. So Paul and I both had coaches while we were operating Nori. And it was immensely valuable and I think I always knew I wanted to be a coach, but you have to kind of have experience in something to coach. So it’s all a beautiful unfolding in my life, the career. But he just asked really good questions and as a receiver of that, I’m like, yeah, that’s the thing, is to be witnessed, to be helped, to be guided through questions.
But what’s interesting too is that you said, how did that decision make you feel, or the consequences. 50% of the time, maybe people respond with what they think. So they don’t actually—and I’m like, no, excuse me. The question was the question.
Ross Kenyon: Very pedantic, but yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: Was how did you feel? And they’re like, well, I think it was this that did that. I’m like, feel, how did you feel? What did you feel? And sometimes I have to describe, and I’m laughing, I’m making light of it because it’s not that serious and I’m not trying to make fun of anybody. But these are the challenges that I also had to deal with because when my coach would ask me questions, how did that feel? What are you feeling? I would also give, this is what I think. And I’m a very emotional person. It’s just the literacy of understanding. I’m asking you your feeling. I’m asking what’s going on. The felt emotion is very different from what I’m asking you cognitively to analyze. And if we don’t have the distinction of those two, then we’re limited in how far we can go with our decision making process.
Ross Kenyon: Why do you think it’s so hard to bring that kind of emotional work into our professional lives?
Alexsandra Guerra: God, I love that question. Patriarchy, hierarchy, the culture that we have. And I want to be very, very clear here because people misunderstand or misuse the word patriarchy, and I want to be clear about what I mean by it.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm.
Alexsandra Guerra: Patriarchy is not men, right? I’m not saying it’s men. That’s not it. Patriarchy that we have in our system is very hierarchical. It is very status driven. It is almost like a zero sum game. Which is very limiting. And you only are succeeding if someone has less than you and you have more than them. Which has all these different repercussions to our mental wellbeing, our spiritual health, and therefore our ability and capacity to create good things for people beyond just our performance and our status.
So to get to your question, I think it’s inherent in the system we live. And until we call out the system, it’s kind of like the fish. I love the little story about the fish that’s like, where do I find the ocean? It’s like, dude, you are in the ocean. No, no, no. This is just water. You have to recognize that you’re in the ocean. You have to recognize the system you’re in. And then once you accept it, first come from a place of acceptance, you can say, okay, well there’s all these programmed things about what I expect to be successful or to be whole because of the system, but I’m going to choose consciously something different, which is what people mean when they say, I want more consciousness. It’s being consciously deciding, are these assumed things actually what I want to accept as truths for me, and make a different decision.
Ross Kenyon: What would it look like if we were to have a different set of norms or did not behave in this way? And I’ll ask it in a slightly more complex way where one thing I keep coming back to—it’s been especially obvious to me the last couple years—the people who run the highest levels of government and business around the world are very poorly adjusted people. I’m like, really? Sam Altman’s going to get to determine the future of whether we have AGI or not? Should this person have this amount of responsibility and power? I don’t think this person is wise enough to do it. Just because they were really good at business doesn’t mean they’re going to be wise enough to know how to do something that’s potentially existentially threatening. Scares the hell out of me.
Alexsandra Guerra: Hell yeah. It’s like, is it—oh, I hope I don’t misattribute this quote—but Teddy Roosevelt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: Lord Acton, I think.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh. So of course, of course you would know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. Quote man over here.
Alexsandra Guerra: Super well read. I know no one else as well read as Ross Kenyon. So yeah. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And I actually live not too far from Mar-a-Lago. I’m based in West Palm Beach. So oftentimes I’m going for a walk and I hear Trump’s helicopter, and it just kind of pulls me out of my life and I’m like, whoa. Over there. Because there’s a lot of people who moved to Palm Beach because they want to be close to power. That’s what it is. People search power for the sake of power because what are we searching for?
And I mentioned earlier when we started that I wrote an article about this, about high achievers, especially how it affects young founders and we’re just trying to achieve because of a trauma response. It is a trauma response to want to prove ourselves to feel whole and feel worthy. And I think that’s what power seeking is.
Ross Kenyon: What’s even the right way to put it. It’s not easy to become a billionaire most of the time. It’s very demanding. The stories that come out of basically all these people’s experiences—there’s so many cutthroat moments where you had to choose. You’re like, am I kind of the villain here? All the other guys are worse, so I’m going to take advantage of them in this deal or whatever. There’s not that many stories where you’re like, just a super nice guy who everything worked out for. So you do kind of make a trade spiritually to even get to that point. Often.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m like, yes. Preach. Because think about the person, who we are as people is pretty much the sum of our choices. And we do have the freedom to, for the most part, choose differently at any point. But think about all the choices, because it’s so hard to become a billionaire, all the choices that you had to make to do that and to keep that up. And I’m like, to me there’s literally nothing more important than the love and the respect I have for myself. Period, point blank. If that means I live a very modest living and I don’t get to fly everywhere, fine. There’s nothing more important to me.
But I think, and this is not to demonize or paint a negative picture like if you’re wealthy you’re a bad person. That’s not my intention here. I’m just thinking about the ultra, ultra, ultra wealthy. I think for the most part there’s a lot of spiritual misalignment that would happen for me, or I think most people, to be the person who makes all those choices, who gets to that state.
Ross Kenyon: And you attribute it to a trauma response from childhood or some other part of one’s life that—I think the gap here, maybe what you’re alluding to, is that this type of status seeking is trying to repair or fill a hole that exists in one’s psyche.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. And if I may, just to stop making this abstract and make it a little bit more concrete and specific, I’ll share my story a little bit. So I’m Ivy League educated. I had a master’s in engineering as well. Very well studied, very intelligent. And I went to Columbia, we started Nori together. Very impressive. We raised all this money. We wanted to reverse climate change. We’re so cool. Doing Nori with you guys is one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. That’s for sure. It’s just so wonderful.
And in the time since then I’ve had a lot of time to reflect, even while we were operating Nori, about what was going on for me. And it became very clear that for so long I was running away from things that were like these invisible ghosts that were haunting me and I was trying to run away from them by doing certain things. And that’s what I mean by trauma response. I was trying to run away from them instead of welcoming them, accepting them, healing them, and choosing something different.
And I think it’s different for every person. For me it stems from childhood. My father left when I was a toddler and then he married someone in her twenties, she was 23, just months after my mom and him split. So it was like, okay, we’re replaceable. And I would try to do every single thing perfect so that my father would show up.
For example, my mom likes to tell this story about a ballet recital. Everybody was there with flowers, really excited, and I was just torn to pieces, crying because my dad wasn’t there. And to me, and I remember that recital, it was always like, what do I have to do? To what length must I go to perform for my father to show up and give me the love that I want? And that I was inherently worthy of.
And also that affected the types of relationships I would pursue with men until I started to heal that. Like, oh, okay, I’ll just continue making myself available to men who are inconsistent in what they say, who are not there for me emotionally, just absent, avoidantly attached.
All that is to say, my mother also was very temperamental, so I was walking on eggshells around her all the time. Whenever I would cry, my mom would say, stop it. You’re ruining everything. And I remember one day being in Kmart in Miami Shores, and I said to her—I don’t know what struck me—and I said, mom, sometimes I just have to be sad, and if you let me be sad and let me feel it, I’ll be okay. And she goes, fine. You go be sad. Find me in the toy section with your brother.
So she leaves. So I go outside in the Kmart garden area and I go to a corner and I cry and I let all the tears out and I go in and I found my mom. But I never allowed myself to express emotion. I was trying to be perfect. I made myself so much smaller for the sake of performing for other people so that they would give me the love that I so needed.
Gabriel Maté talks about this so much in his books. Our first primary driver is to be in connection. Especially as a child, it’s how you survive. So you will give up your authenticity in order to maintain that connection. But being inauthentic and out of alignment with your needs, gaslighting yourself in that way, leads to so much chronic stress in the body. That’s why women who people please often have a higher occurrence of autoimmune diseases, on and on and on.
So bringing a background, as I’m learning about these things, experiencing life, having relationships, building startups, figuring out who I am and recognizing, man, I’m operating in these really dysfunctional ways. Okay, so at Nori, let’s talk about some of the stuff that I did that was so messed up that I didn’t understand. Mentioned this in the article that’s coming out next week.
Imposter syndrome. I didn’t feel confident in myself at all. And so I thought if there was an issue happening at Nori, of course they know it and I’m not going to say anything, which is a total disservice because you guys didn’t see it. And I would be like, why would I need to be on the team?
Another one was playing the hero. I thought I needed to people please and take on more than I could because no one else could do it. So let me volunteer myself to fill this gap that is not met by anybody else on the team. Which meant I took on way more than I had capacity for, which made me an unreliable partner and teammate because I couldn’t do everything.
And then what else happened? I got sensitive to feedback when it came to me because I’m like, how do you not see how self-sacrificing I am and how much I’m doing for this company? And how dare you not appreciate me? Because I didn’t feel appreciated because I was being pointed out where I was falling short because I was taking on too much.
And then burnout, which is a disservice to me. Because I’m a shell of myself and I’m no longer providing something for my team. There’s my TED Talk.
Ross Kenyon: If you read—
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. But I’ve also, I work with clients. My clients are founders in tech, and I see the same things happening with them, and I’m like, listen, if we can’t talk about it, then you’re going to be stuck. And I don’t want that. I want young founders. I want smart, innovative, compassionate people to break free of those invisible chains that’s holding them back so that they can actually innovate on things that the world needs. Because the world needs a lot of good, purpose-driven innovation.
Ross Kenyon: I like the way you presented what you see as your personal dysfunction at Nori. Each one of those incidents led to the next type of dysfunction and this sort of nested spiral.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And it’s really hard to understand how to have gotten out of it. I think what’s interesting about it is that any possible solution to that problem or problems would not have been a business decision. The emotional component, wisdom, self-knowledge was probably the way to solve that. And we couldn’t have just been like, well, what if we hired someone else to do the—you’re like, okay, maybe that helps on one part, but what led to this type of thing is probably what needs to be addressed. Do you agree with this?
Alexsandra Guerra: What do you mean?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think the solution to this problem was just a business organization problem. If I were wiser at the time, I would’ve looked at this and been like, something here’s broken. This feedback loop system seemingly makes things worse. If I were wiser and more compassionate, I think I probably could have intervened to do it. So it’s not only you, but what I’m saying is that each part of this was either wisdom or emotional and not purely commercial. It’s not just who’s in which role. It’s why are people volunteering for roles that they’re inappropriate for and suffering and we’re indifferent to it. And then when they fail at things that they obviously will probably not do as well as their zone of genius kind of work, then we get angry about it. And I will say that I have my own versions of this and I think anyone who’s sufficiently reflective will have the same for their own. So it’s obviously not just you. But do you agree that a lot of the difficulties here had a strong emotional component to them?
Alexsandra Guerra: 100%. And my—I’m receiving, processing and thinking through some things because it’s so nuanced. Because then the answer’s like, okay, well then you shouldn’t be a founder. It’s like, well, here’s the thing. There’s a nuance in all these things made me, and I think you and some others, very ambitious in doing these—I can’t speak for your truth or your story or my co-founders, but I’ll speak for my truth. I think there’s something about what led us to be so ambitious to just quit our jobs, to go all in, to put all the money we had saved. We didn’t pay ourselves for two years, the founders. We paid all our employees. Everything I had that I earned in life, just a few years of working, was gone.
So there’s something there about that was useful in a way. And then also, if that’s part of the formula that gets so many young people to be super ambitious and risk it all, I think we should explore, okay, there might be other formulas. What might that look like? But if you are that, what do you do while you’re in flight, while you’re on this journey?
And I think the answer here is to, one, have awareness, and hopefully people are watching this podcast and get some awareness and we talk about things a lot. And two, invite some kindness and some compassion within each other. Recognize, hey look, my co-founder, I’m going to do this thing with him. I’m going to accept, just like when you enter into a romantic relationship, a marriage, you’re going to accept it’s not going to be sunshine and rainbows and unicorns all the time. We’re going to argue, but I’m committed to you.
And I think that’s something very unique to a co-founder relationship because you’re giving your personal risk and time and energy into it. And then as it starts to go into scale up mode, things need to shift. It needs to be operationalized. I think that’s normal. But when you’re betting in on something together, the relationship of young co-founders is so different than when your startup is scaling. And that’s okay, but that means you need to have a lot of psychological safety.
I didn’t feel psychologically safe. I remember there was one day, we were still in the first office in Ballard before we moved to the other one. And there was an issue that you, me and Paul were talking about, and I said, yeah, but I don’t feel psychologically safe to say something like that. And I don’t know how I thought about that. And you looked at me and you go, oh man, that’s a problem. And I was like, you’re right. It’s a problem.
But yeah, maybe also the third thing would be going to coaches, going to people who have the literacy and the tools to help you navigate that because these are all new skills and if you are trying to learn a new skill, you go and you learn from someone who’s done it. So get coached, get—
Ross Kenyon: The advice I give that’s related to this, if you’ve been coached or mentored or probably just worked with me for any amount of time, my most commonly given piece of business advice is to go to therapy. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most often given things I’ll say, where I’m like, okay. Unless you kind of have a grip on some of these things, there’s going to be some amount of emotional dysfunction that will cause poor decision making here. And it’s not an issue of being smart, unfortunately. Because otherwise you would’ve already fixed it. It’s not—
Alexsandra Guerra: You would’ve found it in a book or a podcast or—yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That’s why I don’t like when people—people oftentimes say what you said about me too. I’ll do my version of this a tiny bit for you too. I’m ambitious and one of the ways that my ambition comes out in a toxic way is I seemingly have read everything and people are always like, wow, that’s so cool, you’re so smart and well read. I did do—
Alexsandra Guerra: I did that earlier. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: It’s so handsome and so wise and such. Yes. You’re like, this is great for me. I’m so happy I read these things, now people think I’m super smart.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. You get the feedback that you were looking for.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. People don’t see the chronic mal-investment into my own skills where I’ve read a lot of stuff. I probably could have been doing more math during that time. I’m also doing things like not having a single quiet moment because I’m always reading a book via audiobook. And then my mindfulness and my ability to be present—people think that consuming content becomes its own kind of a victory or status or leveling up. And it is, in a way. The thing is, it is not a lie. There are real benefits from acquiring more knowledge, but at some point the diminishing returns are pretty great too, where you’re like, the point of life is not to gather as much knowledge as possible. I think it’s to acquire as much wisdom as possible, and that comes out because you become more kind and loving and not smarter. I think that’s kind of where I’m at. Okay. You’re reacting. Tell me what you think.
Alexsandra Guerra: So many things. I’m going to work my way backwards. So the last thing you just said, I completely agree. The wisdom and love is—I mean that’s philosophy and you’re a philosophy major, right? Seeking truth is that wisdom, and I think that gives us love. And I think truly that’s what people are looking for. In the story that I shared about my journey, I was just looking for the love of my father and my mother and the calm, grounded confidence to be in the world. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t intellectually curious. It’s not binary. Everything is so nuanced. I’m a very intellectually curious person. I care about climate change. I care about psychology, I care about people, I care about philosophy. These things are exciting to me.
And then all this idea of content and, okay, we can generate more. It’s how I always felt like nothing I did was ever enough, especially at Nori. It was like, you didn’t read this article. You don’t know who that is. I remember one of our investors, we were at a party or something and they name dropped some big billionaire and we were at this party where they’re there and I’m like, oh, I don’t know who that is. And she laughed and she’s like, oh, that’s so cute.
Dude, what? I’m supposed to know everybody and everything. I’m supposed to know every famous climate scientist, I’m supposed to know every major corporation that might want to buy carbon credits. I should know every single person who’s ever made tons of money. Can you—so I burnt out. Because the expectations—I’ve also written an article recently about this—that burnout is essentially this river of expectations that drowns us. And the thing is now with AI, access to information, content generation is getting greater and greater, and we’re getting overwhelmed.
And so we do have to decide, not just hey, where’s my point of diminishing return so I can make a decision? No, just make a decision. This is how much content I want to create or read. And that’s it. And then the rest of this is also how much time I want to spend meditating or being with my family or cooking or exercising.
So then the way you started that thread too was around the biggest thing that you suggest, or the most common thing you suggest founders do, is get a therapist. I agree. And a coach. And the reason—I’m doing coaching because I find it valuable, so obviously I have an opinion on this. I’ve had therapists while I was working at Nori, I was working with her for several years. And then I also had a coach and they were both great and I had them both at the same time. And they serve different functions.
A therapist will help you uncover—I uncovered all that stuff about my family and the perfectionism with my therapist. My coach’s job was not to sit there and help me identify what was going on. I could bring that distilled information and share it with him. And then he’s like, that’s good. Now what? Now what? Stop looking backwards. Now what? What are we going to do about it today? So both.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think some therapists can do both, but they are different skill sets.
Alexsandra Guerra: True.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, one thing that you said earlier that we moved past that caught my attention too is one of my regrets is that I definitely also—what did you say about it? You were like, you kind of took for granted that people knew what they were doing or had made the right decisions and just sort of—
Alexsandra Guerra: Saw the fire. So one of the earliest things I learned was I was quiet about the fires that I would see.
Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm.
Alexsandra Guerra: And I assumed Alden, Paul, Christoph, you, whoever was in the room, saw the fire and I was quiet about it because I felt like an imposter. And y’all did not see the fires because it was my unique ability to see those fires.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that was one of my learnings here too. One piece of advice I give to lots of founders is that you shouldn’t just trust all of these duties to the CEO. In general, especially things like, you also need to read term sheets. You also need to know what’s in commercial agreements. If you’re serving on leadership, you can’t just delegate that out to the person who’s strictly responsible for it, because it is so company-affecting that you really need to know what a flat round or a down round means for your company and what that means for the cap table, or even things that are just basic business design decisions.
One of the things that kind of makes us laugh is to look back at the crazy auction system that we had back in the early days where we had a lot of decisions that were dreamed up outside of any kind of customer feedback. And then the people who were left to operationalize it, mostly you, would just be like, cool, no one wants this and it’s going terribly. And I would very much like to change it. And because it was like, well this is the plan.
Alexsandra Guerra: Just do it and it’s your fault that you were not able to do it. And I was like, wait, what happened to the looping in customers? Where’s the lean startup principles here? What’s happening?
Ross Kenyon: Sounds really deeply, deeply painful.
Yeah, part of my waking up too is that I didn’t know that much about carbon markets or this world before coming in and founding it because I was bringing a different kind of skillset and experience. And over time, as I did gain a lot more of that experience and knowledge and had studied up and had lots of conversations, some of the things I started waking up to being like, huh, how did we make this one decision? What happened here?
And then that engaged me, as I grew into the more strategically focused role, was very much focused on, do we still need to do it this way? Is this still important to us or can we ditch this thing because it doesn’t seem to be as important as maybe it once did and might actually be harmful or holding us back in some way.
But those kind of conversations are really hard to have, and it doesn’t even matter how old the business is sometimes. I was working with a team recently that had made a decision about where to commercialize their technology based upon where they’d lived in the past and where they had family relations. And I was like, is this subjectively the best place to do this? Or is it just kind of convenient or you want to be there for other reasons? And I couldn’t quite get through to this team in the right kind of way, but I was trying to imply, these are separate things and you don’t need to try to combine these because you’re not able to persuade me and I’m someone who’s paid to kind of hear you out. And people who are not paid to hear you out are going to give you less credit. And this explanation doesn’t make any sense to me.
Alexsandra Guerra: What do you do? Do you tell them? Do you highlight—
Ross Kenyon: If people are paying me, I always tell them the truth or as much of the truth as I feel like I can say in a kind way as I can. But I also try to make sure that it’s done in a way that has the greatest chance of them hearing me.
But yeah. I’ve even done things where one company I worked with once upon a time—how to anonymize this sufficiently—the way that they were paying staff so radically truncated their runway that I’m like, look, you probably need to fire me and probably everyone else except for a couple people that you want to make a co-founder and make them split equity with you. And otherwise you’re going to burn through all your money so fast that you’re not going to be able to continue. And I lost my job after that. I lost that contract.
Alexsandra Guerra: I think that’s the integrity thing to do. That’s exactly right.
Ross Kenyon: I think so. I mean, this person’s paying me to give them good advice on strategy. I’m like, there’s a reason why people don’t do it this way. And the reason is you’re going to go out of business.
Alexsandra Guerra: A little tangent on that, but you’re running a business, you’re doing your consulting, your mentorship, coaching. I do coaching, and I do discovery calls for 45 minutes and I want to know, are we a good fit? And then sometimes when it’s a good fit, I try to close the sale. I’m like, hey, this is what we’re doing. And they’re like, well, you’re trying to close me. I was like, listen, of course I am because I think you’re a good fit. But not everybody’s a good fit. And I literally tell them, but you wouldn’t know that because you’re not on these calls.
And honestly, the tangent here is this is why earlier in the conversation you mentioned spiritual—there was something about this starvation or lacking spirituality. We were talking about billionaires. What I have learned and what I would say many times when people would interview me as a co-founder of Nori and we were still operating, I would say entrepreneurship is a spiritual process and for me it’s a hundred percent true.
So coming back to this conversation about having the integrity to give the advice that would then put you out of the job is the alignment with your integrity and your values because you have a greater sense and trust, I imagine, and things going for you so long as you continue to show up. It’s not like, oh, just sit and meditate and everything’s going to fall in your lap and you’re going to have a hundred million dollars. It’s more like, no, I trust that there’s something greater out there and I’m going to act in alignment with those values.
If someone is paying me that they can’t afford me and they need to make different things, that’s the decision I’m going to make. And that alignment and that trust allows you to move things out of your way, work within integrity, and I think in the end, just live a truly aligned, fulfilling life and better business will come to you that will match that type of value set.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve gotten a lot better at this over time. I don’t know if it’s age, wisdom, how those things are interrelated. I’m not really sure. But I often come back to—we’ve talked about this before—the part of the Sermon on the Mount about the lilies of the field and the birds and how those things are not that important. God takes care of them. You don’t really need to spend a lot of time worrying.
And I’ve said no to deals like this before or I’ve lost deals for, maybe it just wasn’t the right fit. And sometimes you can feel upset about those, but I actually had a client who really wanted to work with me and I ended up saying no and it wasn’t the right fit. And the way that I ended up saying it, which is both a really gentle and kind way of telling someone no, but I think it’s also the truth, is that they wanted to bring me on as an advisor. I was like, look, I don’t think we’re going to be the right fit. Just the way that our brains work. I think you’ll find someone better. And by not working with me, it might be disappointing, but you are freeing up room on your cap table for someone who is a much better fit that you enjoy working with that will be there for the long term. And I am giving you the gift of not taking equity off of your cap table that you will regret.
And part of me is just like, oh no, the scarcity, my economic future is vanishing. But also it freed up time for me to do something else that I would want to do, and I don’t want to take equity for something that I didn’t earn. Doesn’t feel that good either. You like this approach?
Alexsandra Guerra: I love it so much. It’s just nice to see. I meet founders like this too. My clients, sometimes they tell me about things that I’m like, man, I’m just so proud of you. You’re just such a good person. And those are the type of people I want to work with. Because I really want to work with people who are purpose driven, not just for the sake of, oh, I want to make tons of money, I’m going to do this thing. I’ve had some clients like that and it didn’t feel really great. It wasn’t very fulfilling. And I’m like, what was the extra little cash? Come on.
So I’ve learned that lesson and I think it’s really beautiful. And if more people—I am glad we’re talking about it because if more people were able to trust in this and make those types of decisions in alignment, think about how everything else, everybody, would shift. We’d all just fall into the places we need to instead of seeking the power. Like flocking towards people because we want the validation that this fund gave us our seed round or our series A and we’re so cool. And it’s just like, oh yeah. But then they also give you the worst deal ever. And also, how are your board meetings every quarter? And do you trust them?
It’s tough because building a business requires capital. It requires investment and resources, but there are things that you can do to test things out and be a little bit more lean and be more values aligned. And take your time. Let things grow. Not like—we worked in nature. We were doing nature restoration, regenerative agricultural carbon removal credits, and we had this expectation that we were going to scale this thing like Uber or Twitter. You don’t just buy more data centers. It takes tens of years for carbon to be sequestered.
And so within the very clear context of venture-backed funding and tech, yeah, that’s a clear example. But also if we just think about it more on a meta standpoint of, ooh, I can just settle in here, feel what it feels like for nature to—I have a mango tree in my backyard. That mango tree, well, it took years to bear fruit for the first time. The seed goes in the ground, it takes a couple months for it to sprout up. Then it has to survive all these elements, become a sapling, and then grow into a tree, and then years later it’s going to bear fruit. And now it’s huge. And we have all these beautiful mangoes.
And we expect too much. And I think that’s part of the system we’re in. It’s rushing, rushing, rushing, forcing, trying to fill in an inner hole of lack of fulfillment or lack of worthiness, or lack of feeling wanted or desired, whatever, as fast as possible because we’re uncomfortable with it and we’re running away from these ghosts, building these startups.
And then it catches up to us. Eventually it will. I promise you. Unfortunately, I’ve seen it, I’ve done it. But if instead we can just address those things. Give ourselves our own sense of wellbeing within ourselves. Validate ourselves that we are worthy, that we have something wonderful to provide to this world, and then build from that place and let the mango seed take root and grow into a tree and bear fruit over time, as nature intended. That’s what I want, and that’s what I want to help people do.
Ross Kenyon: It’d be nice to have some of that happen more quickly. I feel like I only started—
Alexsandra Guerra: More quickly?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Can you—I remember all of us working together at Nori. You call yourself a walking Hallmark card. And there were certainly times where I’m like, Ale is super woo, and this is more touchy feely than I’m frankly comfortable with. And over time though, you and I have reflected and spoken a lot recently. I feel like I’ve drifted much more closely to how you see businesses operating in a healthy, sustainable kind of way.
Alexsandra Guerra: Mm-hmm.
Ross Kenyon: And it’s much more engaged in emotionality than before where I felt like I was pretty closed off from a lot of that to the extent where people like you almost don’t even make sense to a person like I was. I think you caught glimpses of that in me, but I was also pretty good at tamping it down. Really hard. And then over time I’ve been like, oh, Ale is actually a secret genius here. She knew this all along and we were sort of being like, oh, biggest eye roll on Ale going kind of woo. And now I’m just like, goddammit. She was right the whole time. Oh no.
Alexsandra Guerra: So for the listeners, there were things I did well as well as things that I—
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. And it was funny because I remember I would see that, like a glimmer of, oh, what’s Ross feeling? What’s going on? And that’s where I can tune into the truth. That’s where, for me, that’s my unique ability, empathy. But if you’re closing off the emotions, then I can’t tune into your truth, and then I can’t uncover what our dysfunction is.
And I also didn’t feel anybody was doing that for me. Obviously I was very clear about my emotions, but no one else on the team quite honestly had the empathy skills to tune into, hey, Ale, what’s going on? And get curious and help me through it. And that’s just—that’s why I think empathy is also a really important thing that you need to have a lot of people on your team, or at least 50% of them, with good skills in empathy because this dysfunction is going to happen all the time.
And then there’s something else I wanted to share. So everything that you were saying, talking about wanting things to go faster and building the business. And before we went into the woo. This theme of allowing us to take our time to build businesses sustainably. Let’s go to the title of your podcast, the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Ross Kenyon: The voice is here. Okay. I recognize that voice.
Alexsandra Guerra: The Reversing Climate Change podcast. Staying, just wanting to remember that as the theme—in the call when we started this podcast eight years ago, seven years ago.
Ross Kenyon: Eight years, yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: Is this is why I’m doing what I’m doing now. I’m an environmental engineer. Climate has been at the forefront of my mind forever. And I was working on climate solutions and now I’ve pivoted to people because I realized people are the ones making the decisions that’s causing climate change. And that’s where we have all this healing work to do.
And then I recognized and allowed myself permission to be like, oh, my zone of genius is empathy and adaptability and coaching. I’d be a great coach. My coach and my therapist both told me so. They freaked out when I said, I’m thinking about doing this.
And so if we were to shift the expectation and heal this inner clawing for external validation so that people were just like, okay, actually I’m good. I’m whole, I’m wanted, I’m connected in community. Now what can I create? The things we’re going to create are going to be more regenerative, more sustainable, more kind, more compassionate, more looking at the community, how it impacts the community. It’ll be less ego driven, performance driven, and that’s how we reverse climate change, is we build businesses and economies from that state.
Ross Kenyon: I really didn’t want that to be true. And Nori was the opposite of that, where, what if people could make money when they’re reversing climate change? And that is a lever, it’s a lever.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: It’ll motivate certain kinds of people who otherwise might not care. But the longer I stare into this, the more I’m like, yeah, why do we behave like we don’t want to stay here? Why do we behave like we’re just going to consume this whole place and then leave? What’s wrong with us? And sure we can find economic and technocratic ways of trying to deal with it and that could probably help on some axes, but I feel like what we need is probably deeper than that, unfortunately. It’s the hard work.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, the hard work that no one wants to talk about on LinkedIn. And then I’m talking about it, and I write an article and I get six likes.
Ross Kenyon: You have thunder on LinkedIn by the way. I feel like if I say anything theological or anything even related, I’ll get 16 impressions. I’m like, oh cool. Well I’m glad this person who went to the conference and took a picture there gets 5,000 impressions for—thank you. I’m glad that you had a fun time at the conference.
Alexsandra Guerra: So this is what freaking LinkedIn. I love it. And also get frustrated with it because it is the perfect ecosystem of what I’m talking about, which is this performance signaling, the status signaling. And the content that always does best that I publish will be like, I founded Nori and we did this. People love it. They’re like, oh my God, Nori. I’m like, guys, who cares? Can we talk about the menu? No. I talk about a new client and a problem they’re dealing with and no one—crickets.
Ross Kenyon: Really? Huh.
Alexsandra Guerra: But I don’t care. I’m still going to—the thing is too, there’s the LinkedIn lurkers. I learned this from a friend.
Ross Kenyon: Okay.
Alexsandra Guerra: Are you familiar with this?
Ross Kenyon: I can figure out what it is kind of, but tell me.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, the LinkedIn lurkers are essentially the people who are viewing your content but don’t want to interact with it because they don’t want their boss seeing that they liked it.
Ross Kenyon: Oh.
Alexsandra Guerra: Right. Yeah. So recently I had someone refer me to a new client, a prospective founder, but none of them engaged with the article I wrote on burnout for tech founders, but it was shared privately in the messages. So this happens a lot. And so I would say for those who are on LinkedIn, like you and I, we need to just keep sharing our stuff because there are lurkers and there are lots of people who want to see it. And that’s where our audience is because we are working with professionals and builders of business.
And then also I kind of hedge my bets and I’m doing TikToks all the time and my YouTube’s growing and it’s really great. And I love how people react through there. It’s just much more grounded. I even did a couple TikToks on LinkedIn lurkers and people are like, yeah, we love that. We hate it. Just, you know. But I still appreciate LinkedIn and it’s such a beautiful place for me to connect with cool people, really intelligent people talking about the same things I’m talking about across the world.
Ross Kenyon: Do you also sometimes have just a general feeling of, this is just not kind of right, and you listen to that?
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, but right now I have the privilege that God has given me to be the sole owner of my business. I have a small team and they kind of just do what I ask them to do, but I’m super hands off. I’m just like, hey, can we get this done? Amazing. I love him.
But at Nori, it wasn’t like that. You had to build a business case every single time. And that’s, I think maybe something that we talked about earlier about the relationship with co-founders is quite different than a business. And there’s a weird gray area because then we bring in other people from leadership who are not co-founders. And I’m sure, I know they struggled with our relationship between co-founders because it is so unique.
Yeah, I think these are really tough problems. I would say just be guided by your best attempt to stay values aligned in general, but there’s no right answer and yeah, there’s always going to be a situation where you’re like, I just felt ick with that person. I can’t tell you, my gut is like, don’t do this. So you can say that, another person can agree to ignore it, or ask more questions to understand it with you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, for sure. The co-founders thing—there’s so many things that, especially early Nori design decisions, that crack me up still. And when I come across founders now that I’m working with, I’m always just like—do you remember my whole thing about double mumbo jumbo? Do you remember this?
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s not just mumbo jumbo. It’s double mumbo jumbo.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s from that screenwriting book Save the Cat. But it’s, you can have werewolves or time travelers, but not time traveling werewolves. It’s just too much magic stacked on top of it.
Alexsandra Guerra: All time traveling—
Ross Kenyon: And Nori was nothing except—
Alexsandra Guerra: We were like that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah. There’s seven co-founders and it’s token finance. It’s all on blockchain and it’s only experts.
Alexsandra Guerra: And we have a contract auction on carbon removal. It hasn’t yet—just like, you know? But you have to share it with, I don’t know if you’ve said it on a podcast before, but the parlay bet. I think that’s such a good analogy.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah. I think I usually characterize it as the ultimate parlay bet for a carbon removal startup. So many things that you had to be right about. And if it hit, you’d be like, cool, this all worked out perfectly. And if any one of them failed, you’re like, that was a terrible decision. We definitely should have dropped that one a long time ago.
Alexsandra Guerra: There’s this—I think that’s why, I mean, it’s again, ambition. The farther you go, the harder the fall. In general, I personally am now, and I knew it when I was at Nori, I was like, the next business, because I knew I was going to do the next business. The next business I do is going to go slow and steady and it’s going to be lean and I’m going to test everything.
And so even when I started with coaching, I still have the spreadsheet of all the things I could help founders with. And then I did a quick—Matt Schmidt was one of our board members and he told me this piece of advice after our board meeting once. He used to work at Cargill. And I’ll never forget it. He’s like, you know what? Even the roughest algorithms will lead you to a fairly good, well-informed decision.
So I do this now. If I have a decision to make, I’ll put all the options in a spreadsheet and then I have all the factors I’m considering, like how well I can solve the pain point, how deeply the pain point is felt by the customer and how aware of them. And then time to execution. I wrote all these things, I scored them all. And then I ranked it and I was like, oh, burnout, that’s what I’m going to do.
Even though everybody told me, don’t do burnout. You can’t find people who are burnt out. And I was like, founders are burnt out. And also, I was a founder, so there’s some credibility there. And yeah, I was in a program of people and coaches, how to build your offering. Because I was like, I’ve never done a coaching business so I paid a coaching business to help me. And yeah, I thought it wasn’t going to work either because everybody told me it wasn’t going to work. But it works because people are burnt out and they’re like, I need help and I don’t know what to do and there’s all these things going on.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, there’s something about that when you know that you’re right or have a really strong sense that, okay, the data’s not showing this, but I sense that there’s something here and I will test it in this kind of way. I think it’s a fine thing to do. Maybe it’s just—Nori is fine. Obviously there’s always proximate causes and ultimate causes of failure.
Alexsandra Guerra: But then iterate. Test one thing, test this one language, and then if the language doesn’t fit, change the language to the next best option you have on the list. And do these tests and iterate and then build your business from there. Instead of, oh, we’re going to have a 10 person team and we’ve not generated $1 revenue. It’s like, well that’s a lot.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and also trying to—it’s also the ultimate boil-the-ocean kind of business too, where it’s not only do you have to make a notoriously difficult two-sided marketplace work, we’re also a registry and also you’re not supposed to be both a marketplace and a registry at the same time.
Alexsandra Guerra: Also, we disagree with everybody about what it looks like.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So many stacked contrarian takes on this work. It was tough. But—
Alexsandra Guerra: Also, isn’t that what people loved about us in the climate space? They were like, ah, they’re so different and wacky.
Ross Kenyon: No one has ever said, I liked how different and wacky you guys were.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, maybe not. Maybe not. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: I think the most common thing I hear is that people were happy that when they were getting interested in carbon removal, there was so much content already for them to engage with. Especially with the podcast. I hear from a lot of people that was one of the first things that got them in and it was nice to see that happening. It was great. But also I kind of feel like it probably would’ve happened in a very similar way had we not existed either because Puro was right behind us too and carbon removal was going to happen.
Alexsandra Guerra: You don’t think so? No. But Nori was so unique. We were really trying, we had a team of, again, six co-founders at first and we all had such different things that we were giving to the business. Alden—
Ross Kenyon: I think it was seven.
Alexsandra Guerra: It was seven. Yeah. And then it was six really quickly, and then we were six for a while. Then it was five and four. We’ve got our own resources, our own talents. Let’s build something holistic. We wanted to be category king in carbon removal.
And I think that was really beautiful because I didn’t understand, I was an engineer. So I’m like, why are we spending all this time on a podcast? Grumble, grumble, grumble. And you were right and immediately you and Paul started the podcast and it was, over time, consistently a driver of sales, a driver of reputation, of credibility.
And I think it just happened exactly the way it needed to. But Puro and others didn’t have that. They were doing great as well. They didn’t have that. I think Nori—if we can disintegrate and—I truly don’t believe that Nori failed. I just don’t. I think the business model failed, but in our mission to push the envelope further, to move things further in terms of reversing climate change, we all did that. We brought—we did that. We were one of the first, we were pioneers.
My still best performing LinkedIn post with like 500 likes and all these things is the one when I announced that Nori closed. In the comments to this post: you guys were the pioneers. Nori pioneered. So sometimes I look at my analytics and I’m like, oh, I just love reading this because it makes me feel truly humbled. And you don’t have to have your business be the thing that exited for you to have successfully done something. Learn something. And grown. Success is so much more than that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so too. It’s kind of nice to let go. The longer it went, you end up feeling pretty boxed in at some point, and it was nice to just feel like, it might be nice to do something else. It was obviously painful. I’ve always likened it to what I imagine a divorce is like where it’s a mixture of—yeah, you’re angry at maybe the other person or people. If you’re in a marriage with multiple people and you divorce all of them at the same time. I guess that’s kind of what it’s like. Maybe. You’re angry, you’re sad, you’re also relieved. It’s nice to let go.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s like, okay, something new is coming in.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. This has been so fun.
Alexsandra Guerra: It has been so fun. So many topics.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t even feel my pain anymore. I’m just like here.
Alexsandra Guerra: Wow. Healing. That’s nice healing. Okay. What kinds of founders that are maybe listening right now would be a good fit to work with you?
Ross Kenyon: Great question. Thank you for asking.
Alexsandra Guerra: Those who are purpose driven and find themselves dealing with many challenges that come with the journey, like lacking clarity on what to do next, lacking accountability on the structures and systems. So Ross, you always used to make fun of me, like Ale is so systems driven, so process lady, blah, blah, blah. And you also call me very emotional woo.
And I wear all the time this necklace, it’s a yin yang symbol, a little twisted. But I really believe in the complementary things that is structure and flow. So I’m the type of coach that will help you identify what’s going on emotionally, that’s keeping you stuck, keeping you stuck in conflict with your co-founders, stuck in indecision, procrastination, lack of motivation, all these things that happen with burnout. But also I’m the type of coach who will sit down with you and we will create the systems that you need to move yourself out of that. So it’s feeling and moving, it’s aligned action with your purpose.
And I really love working with people again who are very purpose driven. Who are driven by something greater than themselves to provide impact for people beyond just themselves.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so happy we did this, Ale. Why did it take so long? I don’t even know. Well, it happened exactly when it was supposed to happen. How about that?
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, it happened exactly when it was supposed to happen. Thank you for having me, Ross. It was a pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: For me too.