A Humble Lay of the Land

After doing this for a couple months, I want to reflect on some of the things I have learned about sustainability, technology, and startups. I will gladly admit to not being the foremost expert on any of these topics or even at the intersection of them, but having thrown myself into the area, I believe there are some takeaways that, for the most part, I find refreshing and inspiring.

First—on sustainability at start-ups and beyond—there is an appetite for fighting climate change and building a better, more sustainable world. I used to frequently feel that the powers at be either did not take the problem seriously or did not feel like addressing it. While there is apathy out there, I have found that is clear that there is serious wealth and force behind fixing and improving the environment. Millions of dollars are being given to people with dreams of pursuing their passion and making the world a better place, and frequently they reward the people who provide them resources by working hard to achieve their dream and often succeeding at doing just that. What I find especially inspiring is that the dreams of these people are extensive; they look beyond just fixing a problem and try to make our world more efficient and to genuinely impact lives. This ambition is how our greatest problems will be solved: by going forward, not backwards.

Second, is my realizations about technology. I very much had a distorted view of technological progress. One where progress is made in great leaps and bounds, inventions and innovations arise, and human life gets better. In one day, we go from being bound by gravity to being able to fly. This misses the reality of technology and innovations. The Wright brothers did not show up in Kitty Hawk one day and build a plane, there were numerous failures and mangled chassis along the way. Then even still, an airplane that you or I would feel comfortable getting in was decades away. In that interim, there were countless crashes and two world war-inspired bouts of heavy investment, where the planes we know today were built by people searching for every aerodynamic, engine, and structural improvement they could find. This is how technology works. We can only hope to improve at the margins, every leap and bound has hundreds of tiny steps contained within it. The startups that are changing the world understand this. For their all their grand ambitions, they know there a million steps they must take to realize them. They see inefficiencies and problems and try to make them just a little better, then a little more, then a little more, until all the sudden there isn’t even a problem or inefficiency anymore, awesome technology having taken its place.

One of my main motivations in starting this newsletter was to learn about amazing people who are building really cool companies. At this, I have succeeded, and I hope you feel the same about some of what I have shared. From them I have learned what I shared above, and they all understand the realities of developing technology, and the realities of sustainability. Through all this understanding, the one trait that is a necessity in building startups is delusion. A delusion that whatever vision or dream you have can be achieved and that all the realities between you and that vision can be side-stepped, overcome, or plowed through. Our modern world was built on delusion, and I’be been inspired to find that there is still a healthy dose of it out there.