The following interview is a conversation we had with Troy Carter, CEO and Co-Founder of Earthshot Labs, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $11 Million Raised to Power the Future of Ecosystem Conservation and Restoration.

Troy Carter
Thanks for having me, really pleasure to talk to you. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Troy Carter
I mean, on a professional level. As you said, I run a company called Earthshot Labs. Our is around ecosystem restoration and conservation. How do we direct an order of magnitude larger amount of money towards the climate and ecological crisis? Everyone knows that’s what we need to do. And somehow, as a civilization, we haven’t quite gotten there in agreeing that nature has value and needs to have value within our economic frame. And so that’s what I’ve been doing the last few years. I was also the chief strategy officer at a company called Rhizome and a Co-Founder there doing bamboo engineered lumber in southeast Asia before that, and has been a serial entrepreneur, started three different companies. 

Brett
And I saw on LinkedIn that you had a company called Troy Cider. What was that? I did. 

Troy Carter
That was the first company. I started out of college after going to Stanford and after going through an existential cris, I moved up to just north of San Francisco and was selling wine off, going to different restaurants, doing wine distribution. And at some point I realized that all these restaurants, they didn’t have any cider. And there was actually no cider in a grocery store. Actually, it turns out there were actually no cider brands, I think, on the west coast or no commercial cider brand in the United States. And so I just saw the hole. I went and picked a bunch of apples in Sonoma county and partnered with an apple juice maker and made a first batch of cider. And it sold out very quickly and was like, hey, I can run a business on this. 

Troy Carter
And so that was a fun journey for a few years. I think at some point I became a bit disenchanted by alcohol as a substance that people used rather than as a ceremonial beverage. And so, yeah, basically got disenchanted and sold the brand and moved on to the next phase. But that was a fun phase. 

Brett
Yeah, sounds like that would be a fun business to be part of. Now. Take me back to your time at Stanford then. When you were at Stanford, did you always have in the back of your mind that you were going to be an entrepreneur someday? Or where did that come from? 

Troy Carter
I mean, I definitely did not start my entrepreneurial journey at Stanford. I think it was more an intrinsic drive throughout my life of starting projects, starting businesses, and being in an ever ongoing learning journey about new areas. And I mean, Stanford’s a beautiful place and sort of inoculates a particular field of starting a business and particularly a technology business. And I was definitely caught by that field as well. 

Brett
And you get to be around a. 

Troy Carter
Lot of smart and beautiful people. And so I had a great time. But for people in their college years right now, or going to college, if anyone’s listening, I didn’t feel that I ever gave up my personal agency, even necessarily being part of an institution that you have to take classes and you get grades and all of that. But that doesn’t necessarily drive people towards what fulfills their soul. I don’t think universities are necessarily designed for that. Like the level of consciousness of institutions are really designed towards running businesses. And I don’t know that’s necessarily where people find fulfillment, actually. I know that’s not where people find fulfillment in almost every case. And so take it with a grain of salt that even great universities with brand names, there’s also got to be a whole process of self exploration to find your place. 

Troy Carter
And I think I went through that in my own life. 

Brett
And where do you find fulfillment from? 

Troy Carter
What a great question. So I am married. I have a beautiful relationship with my partner. We’ll be having a child in August, our first one. I don’t know if that will bring fulfillment or not. It’ll definitely bring challenge and newness and I imagine all sorts of learning experiences. Honestly, Earthshot is one of the first companies that I’ve built that integrates what I consider sort of like a personal journey or a healing journey or a spiritual journey along with a business or a team. And to me that was always a bit of a compromise in running other businesses, whereas really a business, even if there was extra impact on climate or ecology, that the way the actual team operated and ran and the relationships within the organization didn’t have the level of ambition or integrity that I think is really needed for institutions. 

Troy Carter
Now, I always say this. Are there any large tech businesses that you think represent the best wisdom of humanity? And I can’t really think of any, and that’s a bit sad, honestly. Why would it be the case that the largest institutions on the planet are not as integrity as we consider ourselves or in our friendships or relationships? So I think it’s part of our responsibility to form organizations that we think are more loving and wiser than institutions in the past. And so that journey, which is definitely not ended, is very fulfilling, or at least very engaging. 

Brett
And it sounds like there’s a high bar there. So maybe there’s no one that meets that standard, but are there any founders or entrepreneurs organizations that you really look up to and admire in the way that they’ve built their organization? 

Troy Carter
Everyone always says Patagonia, so it’s a bit of a throwaway answer. This is one of the problems. It shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the rule. And yeah, there are many people that I admire individually. I don’t know that I’ve yet seen an organization that pulls this off and particularly pulls it off at any meaningful scale. And in particular, you can think of specific dynamics that archetype would play out in organizations, like the power dynamic between employer and employee that seems to perpetuate it even within our own organization. That there’s a power dynamic so that individuals don’t necessarily feel a full sense of sovereignty or agency, or maybe feel a victim of management, or don’t feel necessarily the power to find their voice to direct the organization, even if they actually do have that power. 

Troy Carter
So I think there are these deep, entrenched, archetypal patterns that I haven’t actually seen necessarily any organizations truly work through. So I think there’s just something about the time that we’re in, which is organizations to metabolize some of these themes so that we can actually have institutions that get better and better. But yeah, there are many friends of mine who have sort of like, individual qualities that I really respect. Maybe I won’t go into too many names right now, but there are, for sure individuals that I respect a lot and have large, tremendous amount of fun. 

Brett
Well, it’s good to know. I feel like that’d be a dark world if you didn’t know any organizations or individuals that meant that. So good to know you’re surrounded by some people who do align with that. 

Troy Carter
Yeah. 

Brett
Now, another question we like to ask about here, really, just to better understand you a bit more. It’s around books. So I stole this from someone else, but they call it a quake book. And a quickbook is a book that just really rocks you to your core and really influences how you view the world and how you think about the world. Do any books like that come to mind for you? 

Troy Carter
Wow, what a great question. I read a lot of know one book that I really love is Mars trilogy. And, you know, it’s, I don’t know. 

Brett
Maybe a bit dated now, but I. 

Troy Carter
Just really love how it’s a story of earth civilization that goes to Mars and essentially creates a new civilization. But I really love the feeling of cultural evolution happening. Like, what if you had a clean slate? What would you create? And what you would create is a civilization based on more freedom, like unity. So there’s sort of like a strong sense of needing to work together because the face of the common challenge of it’s really hard to live on Mars. The celebration of many different kinds of peoples, but also the openness to completely new cultures emerging among native martian peoples, where there’s also a level of ease in their lives, where, okay, once you’ve solved the problems of survival around food, around temperature and shelter and the basics, what then is possible? 

Troy Carter
I think there’s a big illusion in our society right now is that everyone has to work very hard and make a living to ensure survival. So we haven’t yet gotten past that phase of just survival. But I think at some point we will actually move into a phase where things become easier, where people have more free time, where there’s more creativity and expression, not based on stress and scarcity, but based on there’s actually enough. And I have plenty of time on my hands to form deep relationships with other people. And that will be a very beautiful time. But I feel like know we’re coming from San Francisco right now. There is a very beautiful side to entrepreneurship and growth and scale, where like, hey, what is the solution to the climate crisis? It is speed and scale, right? 

Troy Carter
But what if it was slowing down and becoming more sensitive to what we want to create? Sort of the beauty way, or forming deep relationships or having again, a sacred relationship with the land where you are? Those are also just as effective climate solutions and maybe more effective. And the sort that I think in a way like ordinary people not in carbon markets or in climate tech can resonate much more deeply with than we are going to mobilize a militaristic offensive against climate change, which it might not work because people get anxious and bored with it. When you talk about climate or carbon policy. People get scared and they get bored. And instead, what’s more motivating is something that they love, some intrinsic reason for addressing climate. 

Troy Carter
Like, hey, I want to preserve the creeks and rivers and animals of my childhood that I no longer see because there has been massive residential development in my backyard. These are immediate ways that are deeply motivating and changing for people. I remember there was a summer in Hawaii in 2015 when almost all the coral died over the course of a couple of months. I remember crying into my mask, free diving. And that’s a mobilizing moment. And it’s a mobilizing moment because it’s something sort of visceral and right in front of you, intimate and sort of imminent that you really want to save. And the only way to address it is by addressing sort of global carbon and climate policy and incentive structures at scale. It’s not about local action. So that’s really what led me to earthshot. 

Troy Carter
But people have to have moments like that of falling in love with something in front of them. Otherwise I just don’t think we’ll get through this in a way that creates a world that I want my children to live in. 

Brett
And I think you were touching on it there in the early part of that answer. But do we need to be at a point in terms of society where we’re at that post survival phase where people don’t have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from and things like that? Because to me it always feels like worrying about the climate is almost like a luxury problem that certain people get to have. But if you don’t know where your next meal is going to come from, then I can also understand with those types of people which make up a large part of population, where this just isn’t really on their radar for something. 

Troy Carter
That they can care about. I think it seems like that. But the truth is that the same issue, that the quality of consciousness that human beings, the way we view ourselves as highly separate from the whole, is a fundamental root cause of how we treat ecological systems. The impacts then on climate and the impacts on income inequality, and sort of like the community holding capacity to pick someone up when they’re unable to care for themselves or when someone needs help, I think there’s a broader shift that needs to happen. 

Troy Carter
And the way is accessing sort of common consciousness right now is through climate, is through sort of a crisis when you wake up, just like in a relationship when, okay, there’s a crisis, someone cheated on someone, or there’s like a struggle that is going on under the surface, and it’s a call to then address that issue and find the deeper reason for why we have created that issue in the first place that it has come to teach us. And the same is about climate. I think it’s the first crisisy enough gateway for people to go deeper in themselves, go deeper in their relationships, and come out with an understanding of life that resolves problems at many levels, including land agency and ownership and income inequality. And the way we make decisions as a collective are on a government level. 

Troy Carter
Like, there are many things that could change if we each go through this crisis moment. 

Brett
And how would you summarize the state. 

Troy Carter
Of the climate crisis today? Well, there’s many layers to it. One is that I’m actually not so motivated by the climate as a crisis. I’m more personally motivated by ecological collapse as a crisis, because it affects things that are very real and tangible to me. Birds, trees, rivers and lakes drying up, coral bleaching and dying. The fact that the levels of species extinction going on right now, people don’t even know what they’re missing. But you go read a wildlife book, or like a book by John Muir in the 18 hundreds. And the story that he tells about walking through miles and miles of tree ferns and redwoods and the wildflowers in California’s Central Valley being so thick and the bees making such a loud sound that you can’t hear yourself talk. We don’t experience those anymore. 

Troy Carter
And that, to me, is a loss that is much more profound than trying to retain the status quo of ensuring our financial position right now as individuals, as families, as countries. So it’s sometimes hard to like when you really tap into the grief of what has happened. It’s really large. And so I think that there’s a good reason why we shut it down and not looked at it. Yeah, but the climate is just the tip of the iceberg into what the deeper crisis is that is going on. And right now the shit is hitting the fan. Like when you talk about food security for less privileged folks. I mean, this is a reality that climate change has already caused an ecological cascade that has led to food shortages and mass changing weather patterns in many parts of the world. 

Troy Carter
That has all dramatic political and migration consequences for people. How we address that is the crisis on this level is just starting. We’re only starting to see the first waves of it. So I’m optimistic that we use this crisis as a way to learn about ourselves and our place within the sort of larger web of the planet. But I’m not under the illusion that it will be sort of like an easy thing that we technologicalize our way out of over the next decade or two. It’s a pretty large issue. 

Brett
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Brett
And if you just look at society, at least from my perspective, it seems like there’s a strong chance that there’s going to be just so much fighting and debating that we don’t even do anything to really try to address this. 

Troy Carter
That’s actually a great question. I’m thinking out loud a little bit, like, why do I retain optimism myself? It’s not an illusion that the consequences of inaction won’t be very severe. I think even with dramatic action, the consequences are going to be severe for humanity and for every other species on the planet, or many species on the planet. So why retain optimism? I think it has to do with death. Because the perspective of humanity collapsing, or of species dying or of yourself dying is inevitable. It’s truly inevitable. It’s one of the few things that is, like, we know is going to happen. And so it’s something we grieve about because we want to celebrate the beauty of species, or ourselves, or our families or loved ones, right? But it’s not something for despair. 

Troy Carter
We don’t need to despair that things are dying, but we need to grieve that things are dying. And I think that is like, grief is a path to action. Despair is a path to inaction. So I don’t know. Appropriately feeling what is happening is itself a gateway to participating in the healing process. And I don’t have a bad perspective about dying. I think it’s okay and it is inevitable. And it’s more about just participating in the process where we are right now versus struggling to prevent death, which is a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing to grieve. 

Brett
I’ve been studying stoicism a lot lately. Not sure if you’ve looked into stoicism much, but that’s a big part of it, is just focusing on your death and remembering that we’re all going to die. And that sounds a little bit negative and dark. And the first time I heard that, I was like, I don’t know if I want to do that. But now that I do it on a regular basis, I don’t know. It’s very fulfilling, and I enjoy the process, which sounds a little dark to say, but I enjoy it. 

Troy Carter
Yeah, I think the fact that we think it’s a dark thing maybe is just a misunderstanding of what death is, and maybe that will be part of the revealing of what the climate and ecological crisis invites us into, is confronting death, and maybe confronting death at a scale that the planet hasn’t seen in a long time, and integrating that learning into our own lives. 

Brett
Yeah, that’s such an interesting perspective. Now, I want to switch gears a little bit and dive a bit deeper into the company. So you talked about what you do there a little bit, but can we just expand on that? And maybe the very direct question would. 

Troy Carter
Be, how do you make money? 

Brett
How does it sustain itself as a business? 

Troy Carter
Yeah, that’s a great question. So Earthshot is about developing carbon projects to get reforestation and conservation projects that are initiated by tribes, communities, governments, landowners, to get them developed so they can actually earn credits and to get them financed so that banks and institutional investors can have access to these projects and invest money in them so they can actually get started. And how we make money is by taking a commission on those investments and taking a credit share in those projects so that our incentives are aligned and in some cases, just getting paid for carbon development services, because it’s quite complicated for a project to go through the process of having a scoping and feasibility study and writing a project design document and then getting registered by Vera or another regulatory agency. It’s complicated and kind of esoteric, and people can’t figure it out. 

Troy Carter
So we support them to do that. And then it’s still a very emerging thing that you can invest in these projects. Like, ordinary people can’t do that. Right. And even institutional investors don’t necessarily understand how to do due diligence on these projects to actually understand, well, how do I get a market rate return on something that’s still a bit of a speculative asset class. And so we do financial modeling and do due diligence, process and risk analysis. And in particular, one of the things that we do that I don’t think anyone else does it anywhere near the level of sophistication is ecosystem forecasting. So we have two methods for ecosystem forecasting, which is basically asking the question like, what happens to this piece of land in the next 30 or 50 years? How will trees grow? 

Troy Carter
How will weather patterns change to reflect aridity or species suitability for that site? And how you project out a forest of the future. Let’s say you plant 100 trees. What happens? How many credits will that project get? What are the impacts on biodiversity and water cycles and albedo and localized cooling? So one way is you can look at the past for nearby areas and then project that into the future. So you use satellite imagery, you use ground truth data, people collect data, measurements by hand of trees, and then you do basically machine learning and statistics to project lines in the future. That’s one way that’s sort of relatively well understood. Now, there’s a second way, which is much more sophisticated, which is called process based modeling. 

Troy Carter
It’s where, rather than building a data driven approach, where you look at what’s there, you actually build a mathematical model of the ecosystem itself, which is taking things like photosynthesis and evaporranspiration, and all the biochemical processes like enzymatic processes and nutrient exchange with the soil, and competition between different species and individual within the ecosystem, weather patterns, et cetera. And you parameterize it based on a specific site. And then you run a simulation into the future. And this is a very complex runs on supercomputers. And so it was a series of methods that we’re taking from academia and then applying to reforestation and doing risk analysis, fire risk, and then also sort of, what is the effect of an intervention on the landscape? So that’s an area that we’re really pioneering as well. 

Brett
And just to help visualize that, can you maybe talk us through one of the projects that you’ve been part of? 

Troy Carter
Yeah. So one that I can publicly talk about is a project that we operate ourselves in Panama, and it’s about a 10,000 hectare reforestation project. And we plant trees, plant 70 different species of trees in area. That was former cattle ranching land, where the cattle ranching became unprofitable. So farmers were moving to the city and not really understanding what to do with their land. So they’re just letting the grass grow. They’re saying, hey, you can put it into conservation, plant trees, and then have a conservation area for wildlife, and we’ll pay you every year to maintain that. And so that’s a really beautiful project that receives upfront financing from different philanthropic organizations and corporations. And then we go and plant a bunch of trees and then earn carbon credits that are shared mostly with the farmers themselves. 

Troy Carter
We take about a 5% commission, and then investors take a portion of credits as well. Super fascinating. 

Brett
And how many more projects like that do you have in the works? Maybe, let’s say, like the next twelve to 24 months. How many projects like that do you. 

Troy Carter
Envision being part of? Yeah, I mean, like that. Probably on the order of one to two dozen. Depends on sort of the scale of the project. We provide sort of carbon development services to many more projects, but of the ones we actually develop ourselves, much fewer and the ones we get financed fewer. But those are pretty large projects. That’s like a $26 million implementation cost over six years. So these were still pretty large transactions. We’re working with some other very beautiful projects, like in Peru with the Shipibo communities, to do conservation, where they approached us because they wanted a partner that was really integrity with their values, in not recommoditizing the relationship that they have with their land they’ve been stewarding for tens of thousands of years. 

Troy Carter
And so working with them to essentially get the money so that they can maintain that land and protect it from incursions from gold miners or forestry companies and things like that. 

Brett
And when it comes to land conservation like this, are there any misconceptions that you see or hear people have on a regular basis? 

Troy Carter
Yeah, I mean, the carbon market has gone through a bit of a reckoning recently where there’s been a lot of press around the lack of rigor in scientific standards, around the fact that credits are illegitimate or there’s been a lot of reputational risk associated. And the truth is that a lot of that criticism is well justified because projects do not necessarily reflect sort of native biodiversity, restoring land agency to local communities. So there have been breaks integrity with this market and that there are projects that do really well and suffer from a conception that all projects then are bad. There’s also maybe a controversy of corporations making claims that then they can continue to pollute. And I think actually, from the data we see the opposite. 

Troy Carter
That actually corporations that do buy credits have a much higher rate of actually reducing their own operational emissions than companies that don’t. So I think it’s both like, of course, we can reduce emissions, we can reduce our nature impacts, and we can do active restoration and conservation using some of the money that we get from business activities. I think both are essential. 

Brett
And final question here, since we are coming up on time, let’s zoom out three to five years from today. What’s that high level vision for the company that you’re working to achieve, and what does the impact look like that you’re going to have over the course. 

Troy Carter
Of the next three to five years? Our goals for 2030 are to enable the planting of more than a billion trees, more than 50 million of hectares under conservation, and more than 100 million tons of co2 drawn down from the atmosphere. That would be an epic impact. And how we get there is by scaling up the amount of money that can be invested in a project. So making nature restoration and conservation truly investable asset class, similar to the way solar or other infrastructure is. And the second is scaling up supply, making it easy and quick for project proponents to get paid for what they do. And these are working with governments, working with many distributed communities and largely in the global south, but also globally. And if we can achieve that will have been work well done. 

Brett
And in terms of turning this into an investable asset class, what needs to happen or what needs to change for. 

Troy Carter
That to be a reality? Yeah, so there’s a few steps that I see happening over the next, say, three to five years. The first is that we have a strong diligence process with a well understood quantitative risk framework to assess project viability. That’s something we, I think, have worked on more than anyone else in this industry so far. The second is having a set of investment vehicles that investors can participate in, particularly an early stage project finance facility that invests in the projects from the very early stages and gets them to the point where they’re derisked and generating credits. Then a third category is another basically investment facility that holds projects once they’re generating credits. And then maybe it’s a fund that goes public so that investors don’t have to hold projects for 30 years, but actually can get liquidity. 

Troy Carter
And so that also institutional investors, but then also normal people, can invest with their pensions and 401 in a security that actually directly catalyzes project development in nature restoration. That would be super cool. And I think all those are possible in the next three to five years. And we’re just laying the groundwork now for that to be possible. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. Troy, we are going to have to wrap here since we’re on time. But before we do, if people want to follow along with your journey as. 

Troy Carter
You build and execute on this vision. 

Brett
Where should they go? 

Troy Carter
Yeah, go to Earthshot Eco and learn all about it. Or you can reach me directly. Just contact me through the website. 

Brett
Awesome. Troy, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your perspective, making you feel a bit more optimistic about where the world’s headed, and just sharing everything that you believe. This has been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed it, and I know our audience is going to as well. So thanks so much for taking the time. 

Troy Carter
Appreciate it. Thanks, Gret. 

Brett
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