Startups Fighting Climate Change, Part 1: Consumer Needs 🌿

No doubt sustainability is one of the hottest spaces in Silicon Valley, and unfortunately it will get hotter if we don’t do anything about it. When Kunal Modi and I quit our jobs to build a company, we wanted to work on something that was personally meaningful to both of us and fighting climate change immediately went to the top of our list. We have spent the past few weeks exploring startup opportunities in the sustainability space and wanted to share some of our learnings and hopefully invite more folks to join in.

Specifically, I will cover some of the learnings on the consumer side of things (B2C) in this post and later, follow up with more business (B2B) opportunities. More broadly, there are lots of other personas in the space, from scientist working on carbon capture, to farmers using more sustainable fertilizers, etc. but given our backgrounds in building consumer social products, we decided to limit our search to serving customers or businesses.

We are sure there are lots of opportunities in “atoms not bits”, but at least for now, we wanted to avoid going into hard sciences and keep using our strengths in software.

The TL;DR; about Consumer Trends

If you search for trends in about Gen Z, the lists and books written about this topic will be more than one can humanly comprehend. I find that simplifying a bit helps here — the big TL;DR: is that the younger generation cares about sustainability and companies…