Your brain says, "maybe we should try this thing... but it's a terrible, terrible idea". (Video of this message on LinkedIn and YouTube)

If you're running a carbon dioxide removal company, if you're working at one of those companies, if you're working on how your company can buy carbon dioxide removal credits, if you're working on policy for carbon dioxide removal, or in some way thinking about carbon dioxide removal day in, day out... then you've probably heard of people working on some strange things to get carbon dioxide removal back on track, things that seem like they would never work, or just seem totally irreleveant.

You have your own bad ideas. That thing you've been thinking about over the last six months. It pops up when you're eating lunch. It pops up when you're out on a walk.

I encourage you to try your own strange, weird ideas, right now.

Trying it out can mean having a conversation with somebody about it. It can mean writing out what that idea is. And maybe it makes it out to your website. Maybe it leads to a complete pivot in what you're building, and how you're engineering it, and how you're going about it. But the time right now is really ideal for trying out these kinds of weird ideas.

You might have heard things like: "We're going to redo all of our engineering so that we have a different approach to how to remove the carbon dioxide." or "we're actually going to be taking a software-heavy approach rather than a hardware approach." I've heard people saying, "We're going to do video updates for our customers. We're going to try and get really connected to what our customers are doing." or "We're going to try and give them updates about all this detailed engineering, or detailed kind of insider information. We're going to share more of that.", or "We've tried selling directly to a customer, but this customer already has a whole portfolio. So instead, we're going to talk with them about that portfolio and see if we can position what we're doing as part of that portfolio, rather than its own thing." Some of those seem to be working, others not so much.

When we look back on carbon dioxide removal at scale, we're going to look at the people that figured out how to take carbon dioxide removal to the next level. And they would have been iterating on these strange ideas, these things that didn't totally make sense today. They might've been little iterative things, over and over and over again. Or it might be some weird idea that completely changes the whole game.

Figure out how you can unlock your own strange ideas. Maybe you heard some that I said here today and you can try those too. Or maybe you've got your own thing that you've been thinking about for the last six months. Write it out, talk with your co-founder or your colleague or an advisor about it.

I really look forward to hearing about the things that work and the things that don't work. Together, let's scale carbon dioxide removal.

Tito

P.S. Gavin Newsom's team put out a funding call for direct air capture pilot demonstrations here due July 31. DAC companies apply!

(here's a silly idea, I wonder what it would take to cram a biochar or rock weathering method into the requirements)