Taking Risks to Save the Earth

After I graduated from college, I had been looking for the intersection between entrepreneurship and the environment. Upon graduating from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2002, I wrote cases for Stanford's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies for two years and then spent a year at Wine.com. Then a GSB classmate of mine put me in touch with a clean-tech investor who introduced me to TerraPass.

Last November, I joined Tom Arnold, the determined Wharton student who turned TerraPass from a class project into a real business, and embarked on what has been the most rewarding chapter in my professional life (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/15/05, "Getting Terrapass on the Road").

TerraPass fights global warming by allowing individuals and businesses to balance their own greenhouse gas emissions by funding clean energy. Say your job requires a lot of driving. You hate what you're doing to the environment, but beyond getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle, what else can you do?

You purchase the TerraPass (anywhere from $29.95 to $79.95 depending on your gas consumption), and we then "offset" the amount of carbon dioxide you produce by funding projects that reduce carbon dioxide emissions elsewhere. You also get a cool decal for your car that shows you're driving a climate-balanced vehicle.

We have a lean team—four full-time employees (three in San Francisco, one in New York City) plus a summer intern from Stanford GSB. Everyone contributes well beyond their official responsibilities. Aside from the daily blocking and tackling involved in operating a startup, I am focused on building solutions for businesses and developing corporate partnerships.

TerraPass's consumer products are leading the industry, so my challenge is to leverage our success on the consumer side to build a business channel. In essence, I am building a business within a business.

So what does a day in the life of an eco-capitalist warrior look like? Here's a sample:

6:15 a.m.— Alarm goes off. I glance out the window to assess how many layers I'll need to survive my seven-mile run through San Francisco's Presidio. I give my Blackberry a quick spin to be sure that no one on the East Coast has any time-sensitive requests for information.

6:30 a.m.— Out the door to meet my friend and former colleague at our usual corner to begin our run. We swap war stories from our respective startups.

8:15 a.m.— With $1.50 in my pocket, my iPod in my hand, and my New York Times under my arm, I walk to the bus stop and hope for the best.

8:45 a.m.— I check for bikes locked to the parking meters on Battery Street to know whom to expect when I walk up the stairs to our office. I say good morning and catch up on whatever has transpired in Europe or China overnight, then fire up my laptop and review my to-do list.

9:00 a.m.— E-mail time. There are typically three to five new requests from small to medium-sized businesses looking to offset their carbon emissions. I quickly review each request and send a customized e-mail response based on of a template I have designed.

9:30 a.m.— I have a message from a buyer at a big-box retailer. I've been working with him for over a month to develop a carbon-neutral product for his store. I give him a call and we speak for 30 minutes about shipping schedules from China, the demographics of his customer base, and how to deliver an effective program that will generate substantial carbon reductions but doesn't fall into self-congratulation or, even worse, appear as "greenwashing," that is, making it seem more environmentally friendly than it really is.

10:00 a.m.— A small investment-management firm and a popular outdoor clothing company have both sent me their completed carbon assessment worksheets. In order to respond efficiently to requests like these, I've built a set of tools that allows me to quickly convert this data into a carbon assessment and price quote. I e-mail the quotes and follow up with phone calls.

Noon.— Our attorney returns my call to discuss the buy-out provision that Tom (TerraPass's CEO [chief environmental officer]) and I have devised to close an ongoing negotiation with a seasoned sales executive. I am hoping to get him to join our team to build a TerraPass channel in his industry, but it's not easy to rein in someone with that much experience and get him to devote a portion of his busy schedule to talking up TerraPass to his high profile client base.

My lawyer and I go back and forth. I want to close the rep, and the lawyer wants to protect the firm from every conceivable catastrophic outcome. I also want to get off the phone quickly knowing that every minute is costing TerraPass scarce cash.

12:30 p.m.— Tom, Orrin (our customer-service and operations guru), Pete (our summer intern), and I head out for a bite to eat.

12:50 p.m.— While eating my salad, I make changes to the contract for the sales exec and send the new version to him. I leave him a voicemail asking him to call me when he's had a chance to review the new terms.

1:30 p.m.— Jennifer, who heads her health-care consultancy's sustainability committee, calls to say that the offset program we had designed together has hit an internal roadblock. The CFO of the company doesn't believe that carbon offsets actually do anything and he is hesitant to approve the expense. I call her back and arm her with a host of compelling arguments about carbon offsets, then draft a follow-up e-mail for her capturing the arguments I presented in bullet points.

2:30 p.m.— Orrin calls out from his desk in the center of the open office floor—"Can you take a call from Jon Bon Jovi's tour manager?" he shouts. Um, yeah, sure, no problem.

3:30 p.m.— After an hour of discussing carbon markets and the ideas presented in Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth with the tour manager, Spike, I have to marvel at the dedication and thoughtfulness with which a man who has spent most of his career designing spectacular live shows for one of the world's biggest bands is going about designing his boss's carbon mitigation strategy. (Al Gore's film was the driving force behind the inquiry—Jon Bon Jovi saw it and decided he had to "do something.")

4:00 p.m.— Orrin calls out again. This time it's a leading online retailer calling to talk about partnership opportunities.

4:45 p.m.— I'm psyched. This guy is smart—he quickly grasps the nuance and the opportunity of retail carbon offsets—and he's the right person in the organization to make this program happen. I put together a summary e-mail of the ideas we discussed and begin work on a slide deck that he can use for an upcoming meeting where he is going to pitch the idea to the rest of his team. Carbon offsets are a complicated story to tell, and creating materials to empower a surrogate to make your case is even more difficult.

6:00 p.m.— Adam (our New York-based director of marketing) calls. He's working on completing the custom application we are designing for the University of Michigan Law School that will enable law firms to offset the air travel emissions from their on-campus recruiting. He wants to know if we have committed to providing customized reports for every law firm or for the program as a whole.

I assure him that we have not committed to customized reports up-front, but if the program is successful, we will commit the resources to building a complete custom set of tools and reports. While the company is in bootstrapping mode, we have to balance our deliverables against the probability of near-term revenue.

6:15 p.m.— I log onto our Web site and update my accomplishments for the week, my goals for next week and the red flags I see in the way of accomplishing my near-term goals and the organization's long-term goals.

6:45 p.m.— I'm back on e-mail, responding to messages and checking in with leads who have expressed strong interest but who have yet to press the purchase button.

7:45 p.m.— I pack up my laptop, grab my iPod, and head out for my walk home. It's 50 minutes home on foot vs. 30 minutes by bus, and I'd gladly trade the extra 20 minutes for the opportunity to be outside people-watching.

8:45 p.m.— I pick up something from Real Foods and curl up on the couch with last night's Daily Show on my DVR.

9:45 p.m.— Back online to clean up my inbox one last time.

10:30 p.m.— I put a dent in my stack of Economist, BusinessWeek, and New Yorker magazines with about 30 minutes of reading before bed. I save my US Weekly stack for airplane flights, but it takes some willpower to leave those untouched on the nightstand.

I don't think I would have gotten this job without my MBA degree from Stanford. My experience at Stanford enabled me to develop a useful toolkit and confidence in my ability to build anything I desired to pursue. Most important, it taught me who to call when I need a helping hand. My case-writing job after B-school at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies also helped prepare me for my current post. I feel as if I know just enough to stick my nose in everything, but not so much that I won't seek out valuable feedback.

The biggest misconception I had before making the leap from my previous employer was that joining TerraPass as the second full-time employee was "too risky." Yes, it's a risky endeavor, but I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from building a business from the ground up. And we're still here, so the risk seems to be paying off. I work hard and I love it. I love that my success can drive the sustainability of our business and, more importantly, the long-term sustainability of our planet.