Why We Keep Showing Up at Carbon Unbound
The agony and the ecstasy of putting on the event that gathers the carbon dioxide removal industry.
This is episode 396 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your shows. You can also listen to it in its entirety right below this paragraph.
Quick Takeaways
10% Discount Code for Carbon Unbound East Coast: ReversingClimateChange
Carbon Unbound sees ~50% new attendees at every event, despite it feeling like a similar crowd
The adaptation event series (Adapt Unbound) was paused after the Amsterdam/flooding-focused edition couldn’t capture enough audience—Oli is candid about the economics not working
Carbon Unbound is entirely bootstrapped: no investors, all revenue-supported
New York (May) will feature CDR-sourced coffee and chocolate on the morning of day one
Three anchor events going forward: US West Coast, US East Coast, Europe—with eyes on Asia, Africa, Middle East
The pay-to-play dynamics of conference speaking slots are real, and the economics of running these events require it. How much is it like first class passengers subsidizing coach?
I described the Unbound team to Oli—before I hit record, naturally—as steppe horsemen. A nation of people we didn’t know existed who swooped in and conquered one very specific segment of carbon removal. As far as I’m concerned, Carbon Unbound is the main place that CDR professionals gather. A couple other events’ feelings might get hurt by that, but it’s what most of my peers would say.
And yet. Events are expensive. Travel is disruptive. Everyone’s budget is tighter. Oli’s been doing this since 2023 and he’s watching the industry mature in real time, which means the pitch can’t just be “come hang out with your friends.” He has to answer the question every potential attendee is asking: what’s my return on this three-day investment?
What I find interesting is that the answer might not be what you’d expect. Oli talks about the content and the networking as the two pillars, and sure, both matter. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: I spend most of my time at these events in the hallway. I’m barely in the main stage room. The value, for me, is almost entirely in the collisions—I know exactly who you should meet, I was just talking to them, let me pull you over here. I probably did that 50 times in Vancouver. That’s not an exaggeration. Maybe a slight one.
The reason I went to Vancouver in the first place was to run campfire sessions on founder grief and the emotional difficulty of this work. Chatham House rules, nothing on the record. The people who attended were like, wow, it was really nice to be able to just say the quiet part out loud. I don’t think that session works on Zoom. There’s something about being in a room with someone when you’re talking about the real stuff—it’s like the difference between telehealth and being in the room with your therapist. Hard to articulate why it’s better, but I feel it, and I think most people do.
Oli asked me if I’m becoming a CDR therapist. Maybe. For a long time I was pretty emotionally closed off to this stuff, and then the longer I coached companies, the more I realized how many of these problems are emotional, spiritual, psychological—not merely strategic. Often those things are all tied up together. Which makes me gooier than I ever thought I was. But people connect with it, so here we are.
One thing that surprised me: Oli says Carbon Unbound gets about 50% new attendees at every event. That seems impossible when you look around the room and recognize everyone, but it’s different people from different organizations, new players entering CDR all the time. The industry feels small until you count.
We got into the economics of events, which I appreciate Oli being candid about. The pay-to-play question—companies paying for speaking slots and visibility—is something I’ve occasionally felt salty about. My rationalization: it’s like first class subsidizing coach. Someone gives a talk they might not have gotten on pure merit, but the alternative is higher ticket prices and fewer people attending. The trade-off is real, even if it doesn’t feel great when you’re on the asking end and the answer is “that’ll be twenty grand.”
The adaptation story is the part that stuck with me most. Oli tried to launch Adapt Unbound—flooding and sea level rise focused, set in Amsterdam, which is literally built to mitigate flooding. And it just... didn’t work. Not enough interest, not enough economic surplus to justify the event. He was baffled. I wasn’t, entirely. When I was doing the venture fellowship at Lichen, I looked at a bunch of adaptation deals and kept running into the same wall: the discount rate problem. You have cash now versus a theoretical risk at some indeterminate point in the future. The farther away the risk, the less that money is worth in net present value terms. Wildfire tech works because fire is a problem today. Sea level rise? Humans keep telling themselves they’ll deal with it later. A dollar now saves a hundred dollars ten years from now, and I’m not even sure that’s investible. It’s a depressing conclusion but I watched it kill deal after deal.
The conversation turned—as my conversations increasingly do—toward the question of whether this industry takes itself too seriously. I’ve been on a quiet campaign for more zaniness and more wellness in CDR, which sounds like a contradictory pairing but I think they’re actually the same impulse: stop performing seriousness for five minutes and see what happens. I pitched Oli on watercolor painting sessions at Unbound. I pitched communal salads and adaptogens instead of the obligatory networking drinks.
Oli mentioned The Drop in Malmö and Alt Carbon’s summit in India as events that are doing the culture-forward thing well. He’s clearly thinking about it. And he pointed out something I’ve noticed too: people in this industry secretly love the memes, secretly want to talk about the big existential stuff, but there’s a professional inhibition around being seen as not serious enough. I know you all want more memes. I know you all want to talk about real things. You don’t need to pretend you’re only one thing.
The episode ended where a lot of my conversations end lately—on the question of how you get from being a person who knows gratitude matters to being a person who actually lives it. I told Oli about getting genuinely frustrated at a coworking space because people preferred fluorescent lights over the nice lamps. Deeply spiritual person, me. Very well-adjusted. Working on it.
Full Transcript
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