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Microsoft recommends you join AirMiners

September 30, 2020

I just heard from a friend that somebody they know applied to a carbon removal job at Microsoft -- and the person at Microsoft recommended they join AirMiners! (Keep reading, or you can watch here on YouTube)

That is so cool to know that there's a fan at Microsoft recommending people join AirMiners. I've heard many similar stories recently, "oh so-and-so is already in AirMiners", "yes we're well aware of AirMiners", "I'm an Air Miner". With every recommendation from somebody behind the scenes of Microsoft, Shopify, or the Department of Energy, more connections are being made and more people are becoming AirMiners.

I thought it would be useful to share a bit about where AirMiners is today, where it came from, and where it's headed.

Back in 2017, AirMiners started as this idea of a "LinkedIn for carbon removal". The idea was to help people get connected in the carbon removal industry. Matthew Eshed and I interviewed super-hubs in the space like Noah from Carbon180 and Christophe from Nori. We thought "how do we help help hundreds of other people get super connected too". It started as an index similar to the one shown on airminers.org today, and soon after on the community side Dvorit Mausner created the Slack group kicking off this constant buzz of all the stuff that's happening in the industry.

Then at VERGE Carbon last October, everyone I met seemed to mention AirMiners in some way or another. It's around that time that AirMiners became *the* place for people pulling carbon from the atmosphere. Now forward to today, AirMiners is an active group of professionals working in carbon removal, including over 600 members on a Slack group and an event series led by Jason Grillo twice a month with super-engaged attendees. (I was just talking stories with Matthew about last week, there's so many OG people who have been around AirMiners forever, I'm sure you have stories, would love to hear them, hit reply!)

Looking ahead, AirMiners improves humanity's ability to pull carbon from the air by accelerating connections between inventors, creators, and visionaries in the carbon removal industry. If fellow air miners can shave a year, a month, or even just a day off a connection to a co-founder, an investor, a new idea, or a new job, that's a type of improvement that compounds over and over. Sure, we can leave this to grow organically, people do just connect on their own. But AirMiners has the potential to figure out how to navigate those things then share the lessons that we've learned with the rest of the community, what works, what doesn't work.

Ultimately, figuring out what works is why so many people become Air Miners. They're laser focused on pulling more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, how do we capture it, how to restore it have returned useful things. Whether you're working on soil, direct air capture, collaborations, or policy, all of us are brought together because we care about pulling carbon from the atmosphere.

From those of you in the AirMiners community I'd love to hear from you. What does it mean to be an Air Miner? What's working about AirMiners, what's not, what could be better, what bugs you?

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