What a day! Great to see so many of you today, some you would expect and many who just showed up for a good show. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Major appreciation to everyone who supported us through ideas, advice, interviews, and suggestions, and special thanks to Jason Grillo, Tyler Robinson, Marie Domingo, Stacy Williams, Purin Phanichphant, and Jeff Mori for lighting the rocket.
For those of you who couldn't join today...
Today we announced AirMiners Launchpad, a collaboration between AirMiners, XPRIZE, and Creative Destruction Lab. AirMiners is officially working with Creative Destruction Lab to design our Launchpad program and support all XPRIZE applicants, competitors, and finalists. Read the press release here.
My introduction is on YouTube -- watch my introduction here (5 minutes), or you can watch the full event (35 minutes).
Here's the rest of the story.
The solutions that exist for carbon removal today won't take us all the way, not even close.
But we can get there -- just like over the last year humanity sequenced the COVID19 genome in record time, designed a vaccine, and then scientists, engineers, doctors, governments, and local communities came together to design, manufacture, and deliver vaccines into millions of people's arms. All at a timeline no expert though was possible. We need to do the same thing for carbon removal.
About a year ago I started working with Rodney Payne, founding partner of Creative Destruction Lab Climate. We wanted to figure out how AirMiners could have the most possible impact.
We looked across the air mining industry, interviewed scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, accelerator manager. We took a step back and analyzed what we saw. The biggest corporate players investing and inviting teams to apply for funds, entrepreneurs talking about a trillion dollar opportunity, scientists and engineers sketching new ideas for solutions for carbon removal using seaweed, direct air capture, and nuclear power.
They were all aligned around the common mission of pulling carbon from the air. How do we enable 1000x more of this for the massive impact needed?
We went down a lot of different paths on this, lots of u-turns, mischief, dead ends, learning the whole way (easier to say that in retrospect of course). "Be like water", not pushing for a particular solution, just making sure we had the problem clear. Then a few months ago we announced we were working on an accelerator to systematize what was happening organically throughout the air mining industry, to send more entrepreneurs and team and ventures out into the world. We worked with Paul on developing a program to do this.
Then a few weeks ago, we got connected to XPRIZE as they were setting up their new $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal. It all clicked.
If you're an entrepreneur or startup looking at carbon removal, you now have 3 world-class organizations to accelerate and support your progress. Together through Launchpad, we're providing the necessary expertise to supercharge startups to do something critically important for humanity.
We also plan to invest directly in this industry, and we’re hiring for a fund lead who is passionate about carbon removal, and working with early LPs to invest into the early stage carbon removal startups. If this sounds like you, feel free to get in touch.
I write a weekly newsletter highlighting the AirMiners community and carbon removal industry.
Every week you’ll get insider perspective and community stories from the cutting edge of carbon removal.
The purpose of this newsletter is to accelerate the carbontech industry by speeding up connections, progress, and coordination. It's ideal for people working in carbon removal already, or beginners who want one individual's perspective. People curious about carbon removal are encouraged to sign up and see what sticks.
Subscribe here to get the next weekly update as soon it comes out.