Climate Careers: Anshuman Bapna, Founder at Terra.do
Today’s guest is Anshuman Bapna, Founder and CEO of Terra.do.
Terra.do is an online school working to solve climate change. Millions of people will need to transition into climate work in the years to come, and Terra.do is the platform to help make that happen. Since launching their flagship 12-week course, “Climate Change: Learning for Action”, they have rolled out new courses on hydrogen, climate-smart buildings, climate-resilient agriculture, and a track for venture investors looking to do more climate investing. Their goal is to educate 100 million people to join the climate fight.
In this episode, Anshuman walks me through his own climate journey, what led him to switch from tech entrepreneurship to working on climate, the Terra.do origin story, their progress to date, their long vision, and a great discussion about what types of skills people will need to reorient their careers around helping address the problem of climate change and how Terra.do can help.
This one is a can’t miss for anyone looking to reorient their careers around working on climate!
Enjoy the show.
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded February 15th, 2021.
In Today's episode, we cover:
How Terra.do is facilitating career transitions into the climate space
What led Anshuman to start the educational platform, their progress to date, and long-term vision
An overview of the skills people need to reorient their careers towards climate and how Terra.do can help
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Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone. Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey, or MCJ, as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1,300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screen for the determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, the optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better.
There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community. A number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of non-profits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open-source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website, and click the Become a Member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Hello everyone, this is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest in the inaugural episode of the MCJ Climate Careers series is Anshuman Bapna, the Founder and CEO of Terra.do. Terra.do is an online school for anyone who wants to work on solving climate change. Their thesis is that millions of people will need to transition into climate work over the next 10 years, and Terra wants to be the online platform to make that happen.
Learners undertake a 12-week online course taught by world-class climate experts and practitioners, and during that time, they gain a deep understanding of climate change and climate action and learn how to leverage their own skills for maximal impact in the climate space. This was a special one because Anshuman also has gone on a journey that very much mirrors my own and was inspired by the MCJ community, much like the MCJ community is inspired by the work of Terra.do. Thus far, our collaboration has been informal, but perhaps there might be ways we can work together more closely overtime. At any rate, Anshuman, welcome to the show.
Anshuman Bapna: Thank you, Jason. Excited to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Excited to have you and this is also our inaugural episode of our new Climate Careers series, and we couldn't think of a better guest to kick things off given how relevant what you're doing with Terra.do is to the MCJ community and also how many people from within the community are finding great value from it already.
Anshuman Bapna: That's right. I think MCJ was in so many ways the starting point for a lot of the Terra journey. So I'm really glad that we're finally getting to do … to do this.
Jason Jacobs: Me too. So well I have so many questions about the journey, but before we get too far down the path, maybe we should just start from the top. So what is Terra.do?
Anshuman Bapna: So Terra.do is an online ramp for getting a 100 million people who are outside the climate space right now into climate. So the idea is to build everything that is needed for them to identify what specific problems that they want to go after, then identify opportunities both at companies that they might join or companies that they might start or in other ways to find the work that they would really like to do, and then make them successful through this network of mentors and community that is built behind it.
Jason Jacobs: And can you talk a little bit about the how? I get that you're trying to get people … 100 million people from outside of climate to work in climate, but what is the Terra.do approach and also how consistent will that be in terms of what you're doing now versus what you might like to do in two years, three years, five years, 10 years?
Anshuman Bapna: If you look at the climate space, I mean, this space is literally everything under the Sun, no pun intended. You have vast sectors like energy, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and then horizontals like finance, media, et cetera, who're all going to be impacted by climate. And our belief is that one way or the other climate is such a fundamental existential problem for humanity right now that each of these sectors will have their "Internet moment" where they would realize that whether they like it or not they are in the climate business in some shape or form.
And you would see two different kinds of trends: one is individuals outside really motivated to get in but also individuals who are in each of these different sectors realizing that they need to up-skill as far as climate skills are concerned. So you might be a risk professional at a large bank and you might need to understand climate risk very quickly for you to be effective at your job. You might be a supply chain operations research person who needs to understand sustainable supply chains now, and that will happen across sectors, across jobs, and so on.
So our phase one, the way we think of it, is to be the starting point for all climate learning. So what that means is that we build a platform where there are horizontal programs like the one that we … one of the one … the … our flagship program right now which is a 12-week online bootcamp that takes everything climate and kind of throws you into the deep end of all of those different things. But then we also have vertical programs. You see a few of them already on Terra. So we have, for example, a program on hydrogen, which is a very niche but exciting sector inside energy that came up and is in its third iteration right now. And we have programs at the other end, which is how to make supply chains for agriculture much more resilient, and then we have over the next six to nine months we'll see maybe another half a dozen or so programs go live.
All of these programs are built by partners, by experts in this field that we reach out to. And what we do at our end is to, first, help them with the technology and the marketing but also in the pedagogy, because I think with our own experience now graduating about 200 people we've learned what works in online education and what does not, completely from first principles, and especially for something as mission driven as climate. So we take all of that and work with our partners to get them to be successful in launching these programs on Terra.
So phase one would be that by the time 2021 is over, our hope is that we would have covered the bases in terms of the primary learning opportunities that exist in climate right now, both in horizontal and vertical areas. Phase two, hopefully, is that all of these individuals are coming in through very different learning opportunities. Somebody might be a project developer and coming into our hydrogen program, somebody might be someone like me a tech executive who's trying to up-skill or understand climate, and you have all of them in a single community, which is now trying to build out all kinds of things on top of that.
So, for example, imagine people collaborating to start companies together or people collaborating just to write research papers together or people starting out and joining organizations which are working in climate and taking their skills that they've acquired through their entire careers to those organizations. So that's phase two where it becomes a bit of a talent pool for the entire climate ecosystem to tap into. And then phase three is that we almost kind of open this up as an API to the entire climate world where the assumption is that if you were to, for example, start a crowdfunding website in Africa for climate-related things, you should start it on Terra because 100,000 people who're all activated in climate are already on Terra. So that's kind of the phase one, phase two, phase three of how we think about how we'll eventually reach a 100 million people.
Jason Jacobs: It reminds me a little bit of AngelList.
Anshuman Bapna: Interesting. I think AngelList is in that sense the democratization of investments. It was something that I think … I mean more power to the team that built that out. I think that is … what I like about the analogy is that an AngelList is ultimately sitting on top of a talent pool and that talent pool has this classic network effect, which is the n plus one person wants to be in that network pool because of the n people already there. And hopefully, that's something that we will catalyze for climate as well, and not just in one country but hopefully across the world.
Jason Jacobs: Now, I was about to ask you how this all came to be and when this all came to be, but I want to maybe even take it a step back further than that. What is your climate journey?
Anshuman Bapna: So my climate journey is kind of an interesting one. It's like I was part of that Stanford class of 2005 that was in that stadium when Steve Jobs was talking about how the dots connect.
Jason Jacobs: You can't connect them in … in hindsight it all makes sense but not as you're going through it, right.
Anshuman Bapna: Exactly. So my career has been on one side it looks like a typical tech entrepreneur, starting and selling multiple Internet companies across these last 20 years. But at the same time on the side the kind of stuff that I was building, so I was running a nonprofit in India for some time while I was employed at Google, which was focused on getting talented people outside the political space in India to work with elected representatives on constituency development. And you can see shades of that in what we're trying to do with Terra all over again. It's only in hindsight that I realized that.
And even in college when I was an undergrad, the kind of stuff that I was building was I started the entrepreneurship culture at IIT Bombay, because at that time, back in 2000, nobody thought of starting companies back then. So I would bring all kinds of amazing people, experts, etc. to come to campus and give talks and then build this platform where people could put up their companies for discussion, and I ended up becoming the first company and the first startup getting funded out of that. But that is how, again, all of that platform has kind of come back in how I am building out Terra. I mean, I was kind of literally going along semi-consciously aware of this whole climate anxiety that was building up inside me, but I think the moment for me was 2016 to a certain extent.
So I think a couple of things happened: one Trump happened; Brexit happened. And we were … with my two kids, we were in the Great Barrier Reef, and my younger son could not snorkel because he was too young to do that, but my older daughter could, and she had the time of her life. And that year was one of the first years of the mass bleachings that happened, the mass coral die-offs. And by the end of that year I realized that I had been taking for granted that the world will obviously be a better place for our kids, but it became very clear to me that that was not a given. I had … you had to actively work to make that happen.
So that was a big aha moment for me. And then again back in 2019-'20 when I was thinking about quitting my existing job and starting something new, at that time this was right on top of my list, because of this very interesting framework that Yuval Harari had in his otherwise pretty bad book called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century where he talked about how you could think of your life in terms of five-year, 15-year, and 50-year projects. And I realized that all my life I had done five-year projects like startups and things and so on. 15-year projects are probably my kids, that too subconsciously, and 50-year projects I hadn't even made the list. And the thought that strikes you is that if you don't start a 50-year project at age 40, when exactly are you planning to start that.
And then I made that list, climate change was right on top, and then I just dived deep into it. And honestly, Jason, a lot of parallels with your journey in the sense that it was almost like I was co-developing all my thesis as you would go out and talk to individuals and ask them in the beginning fairly straightforward questions and then I could see over a period of time your podcast, your interviews became so much more sophisticated, so much more nuanced, and that was how my learning also started building up, and honestly, your podcasts were a big part of that.
Jason Jacobs: And given your background of building technology companies before what is it that led you down the path of … and it's not that this is not a technology company, by the way, but it's a little more nuanced. So, well, I guess, for example, you could ask me the same question of after building companies tackling specific problems, why am I now building a community of people tackling problems versus tackling a problem more directly myself. And I guess I'll ask you that question that people so often ask me.
Anshuman Bapna: Yeah. And I wonder if my answer would be very similar to yours, which is I really wanted to stay horizontal at this stage. So to me, the scale and urgency of the problem was such that any of these solutions, which potentially solve for climate, would be just one amongst many dozens that we would need. And each of them are worth a lifetime of effort. So even if I was all gung-ho to learn everything about genomics and get into a new kind of seaweeds that will reduce methane production and so on, I knew that that alone is a lifetime worth problem. And that was not necessarily my skillset.
So my skillset was to potentially build platform or platform-like things and that's what I had done at Google, that's what I had done at the last company which had acquired us, India's largest online travel company. So the way I saw it was that at the scale and urgency, you would need … you could potentially do three different things: one was if I could figure out a way to get a $1 trillion in capital into climate then that money with the efficient market hypothesis or some version of that will eventually find its way into the right things, whether mitigation or adaptation and so on. But I didn't know how to get a $1 trillion in capital.
The second one was if I could solve somehow distribution. So if I had a way to get good ideas out there in front of 1 billion people, then that would make sense, too, and that could be, if I was a policymaker, for example, in the Indian government that was entirely possible, but I didn't know how to work the government channels by that stage.
But the third one, which I kept feeling again and again was that … and to me it felt really strange as an outsider because it felt like on one side we were talking about essentially transforming a third to a half of the world's GDP over the next 20 years, all of these different sectors that need to be reconfigured for the climate economy, and yet the number of people directly working in climate seemed to be less than 1 million. So to me it felt like one way or the other we would need this massive influx of talent coming into climate. And my own personal experience was that it was really hard to get into climate. It just took so much to be able to track that.
So it felt like 100 million people always sounds to me either a government or the Internet, and I know the Internet; I don't know the government. And second, it felt like all this friction that of learning, of community, of doing that existed out there could potentially be solved through an Internet platform that would take all these talented people across the world and get them into a single room and get them to solve these … learn and solve these problems. So to me it actually felt like a very classic Internet company. And if you saw the phase one, phase two, phase three that I'm talking about, I mean the phase three is some version of this API of all climate talent out there, right. So I don't know what that even means right now. But that is the kind of platform thinking that I could bring from my Internet background. I would be really curious, Jason, how you thought about this.
Jason Jacobs: I didn't go in intent on building a company. I went in on … intent on having the biggest impact that could on addressing this problem, and then for me, I just started learning and didn't worry about where I would fit and then the journey just kind of became the destination because there was so much to learn. And by learning in public, it was helping with the problem. And we've just found other ways to continue to help in larger ways and in more ways over time. But I mean at least for me, it seems clear that I can have a bigger personal impact working across areas than I could in any one …
And that was put to the test to me a few months ago or maybe a little longer, at this point, when I mean there was a founding team coming together for a very big area of decarbonization that was starting at the ground stage. That was a very experienced team that I had known a long time and the kind of people I would kill to work with and working on this very exciting thing, and there could have been the opportunity potentially for me to come in alongside as the third or fourth person in. And if that kind of opportunity were what I was meant to do in this next phase that would have been it, and wasn't tempted at all.
Switching gears a little bit. One thing I wrestle with and I … I mean you're pretty uniquely equipped to chime in on this one is that climate, as you know, is not an industry. It's every industry. In a way, it's no … also no industry. And so if you're equipping people to work in climate, I would think that's a completely different set of things you would need if you're focused on nuclear versus focused on grid efficiency versus focused on synthetic meat versus focused on micro mobility or electrifying aviation or concrete or industrial processes or CPG or it's all different and also functionally like to be a lawyer versus a hedge fund manager versus a scientist versus an activist, completely different. So how does one even have an intro course for working on climate?
Anshuman Bapna: And I think the answer is to not have one but to have many. In fact, that's exactly what we are seeing. So I mean think of the problem as this. So imagine that electric vehicles is a space that we really wanted to understand and potentially transition people into. Now where would these people come from? There are potentially two buckets: one bucket is smart people outside the entire EV space all together who are now seeing all the action in this space trying to get to grips with what's the overall landscape looking like, where the opportunities and challenges are, where the regulatory arbitrage is potentially, and then using that knowledge and the network and the community that they find through a program like this to go out and go into an accelerator, into an incubator, or go raise a round. So that's potentially one smaller set of people.
But a much larger set of people is essentially people who are up-skilling. So I mean look at Mary Barra's announcement about GM becoming all electric by 2035, right. That's, I don't know, 120,000 people that we're talking about across GM. Now GM might be equipped enough to retrain a lot of these people into what electric vehicles are all about. But the ecosystem that flows down from GM, so imagine the entire automotive supplier ecosystem, a large part of it, by the way, that sits outside of the U.S. It sits in Mexico, it sits in India, it sits in many other places. Everyone who's … they might be a drivetrain engineer and sitting in India or they might be manufacturing a certain automotive component, both at the strategy level and at the engineering level is racking their brains and saying, well, what does this mean to us.
Now it turns out that the engineering problem, which is essentially a trade re-skilling problem, might not be something that Terra might be great at right now, and I don't think we want to get into that as of yet, because that's a very deep problem. However, the strategy and the business problem, which is if I'm an automotive supplier, a equipment supplier, what does this mean, what kind of trends are we talking about, how quickly can EV adoption go from where it is right now to 10 years from now and, therefore, what should I [inaudible 00:19:45]. All of those are almost like the EV 101 equivalent that hundreds of thousands of people potentially across industries would need.
So, for us, the way we get into EVs is through this EV 101 business plus policy plus strategy plus technology kind of a program and network that we'll build out. Now take that across from EV to a different area to regenerative agriculture, and we have a regenerative agriculture program right now. That regenerative agriculture program is also focused on farmers who are running large cooperatives and what they're trying to understand is they understand … I mean they still want to understand well what are the latest cutting-edge regenerative practices, which is again a very one-on-one kind of introduction to this, but also how big is this ecosystem becoming and how quickly. So, therefore, I think in a way think of our … these vertical programs also as 101 programs for the vast majority of people inside the sector who need to really quickly get to grips with the scale and speed of what the climate transition is looking like in their sector.
Jason Jacobs: I threw out the AngelList comparison before. I'm going to throw out a different one just for discussion purposes. And if you were to take, let's say, the On Deck Fellow's program and instead of having fellowships across podcasting and opera singing and fun management and things like that and they now have a climate one, if you were to take that and say we're going to only do climate, but we're going to do a hydrogen one and a regenerative ag one and a grid storage one and an energy efficiency one and an advanced nuclear one and things like that, is that maybe a more apt comparison or compare and contrast?
Anshuman Bapna: That's a great comparison. I think that's On Deck but for all kinds of things climate is a great comparison. I think there's one challenge, though, and that challenge is something that I don't think we have a good answer to yet. But the challenge is that the way these programs work well is typically by exclusion, which is that you have to work really hard to get in, and once you get in, then there is kind of this whole pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Now, unfortunately, at least my thesis is not that … this is not how climate will get solved. I think what we need to figure out is a way to be as inclusive as possible which is, by the way, one of the interesting things about a call that we made early on in the Terra fellowship itself, which is if you look at the application process for the Terra program, now in theory we could be asking you a ton of stuff that essentially is trying to qualify you and get you to jump more hoops to get into the program. What we do instead is that the entire process is geared towards trying to find out how deep your intent is, not what your background, what your pedigrees, etc., etc. And that we … and if we believe that your intent is really deep and you might be an undergrad in a college right now in India, we will let you in, because we think that is how we expand the pie.
Even then, cohort-based learning by definition is very … is designed to be exclusive, not inclusive. So, therefore, there are parts of the Terra model that we are going to be experimenting with which will allow this to be a lot more open-ended and lot more available to people who are not necessarily either constrained by dollars or constrained by time to be a part of these cohort-based learning programs.
Jason Jacobs: Can you talk a bit about how the programs are structured today, how long they are, how many people in a cohort, a bit about the curriculum, I don't know the best way to attack given that you've got so many of them, but answer it how you will.
Anshuman Bapna: I'll talk about the core program that we have, which is a 12-week online bootcamp. The way it's structured or the design principles for that were one was to give you a sense of a framework on how to assess climate challenges and opportunities that work for you. Second is it is designed to be global from day one. And third, we fundamentally believe from a pedagogical standpoint that you need the right combination of asynchronous and high-touch human elements for learning to truly happen.
So the way we pull that all together with this program is that the curriculum, first of all, itself, is covers everything from climate science to climate psychology, but the kind of detours that we take are interesting. So, for example, we take an entire nice detour on adaptation and that part, the sad part is that capitalism still hasn't found the answer to adaptation in a big, big way. So how do you … the fact that India has like 400 million people who are still dependent on monsoon agriculture and 250 million people living on the coastlines, and India is going to be one of the highest impacted countries, so therefore, we need to essentially re-skill these individuals, 0.5 billion people and have them be deployed in different part of the economy altogether. There's no capitalistic answer to that. There's a lot of government involved. There's a lot of policy-making involved and so on. And yet it is a very, very important part to understand when you're thinking about your climate thesis on what a climate-solved world would look like.
So, therefore, the curriculum itself is very global by design from day one. The cohorts themselves, so what we do is that we started out with like a small cohort of 20 people which has now grown to about 150 people across 21 different countries, and each cohort starts out at the same time, but we break up the entire cohort into groups of 20 people each at a time. And each of these 20 people has an instructor or who we call a climate coach associated with them. The climate coach is typically a recent PhD in one of the environmental sciences from Stanford, Oxford, Harvard, and so on, and their job is to essentially help you unblock yourself. So they conduct these lab hours twice a week that allow you to come in and discuss the topic that has been going on in the class and make sure that you understand that really well but also help you sometimes just process the amount of anxiety that climate understanding can often bring and you have to cross that point of anxiety for you to be truly effective again.
So this combination of having asynchronous classes that you can consume at your own time but at the same time these human elements of both your climate coach and your peer group that is there to support you and then we have this mentor network of about 100 people who are 10-plus years in their climate work, so they could be working at an RMI, but they could also be working at a climate tech fund and something in between, you could set up one-on-one time with them to understand what your climate career progression might look like.
So it's a combination of all of these different elements that the core program looks like. And again the outcome that we really care about is what fraction of our graduates are working in climate within six months of graduating from the program. So, therefore, a lot of work actually happens after you graduate from the program where you're still part of the community and we conduct climate job fairs for you, we do demo days for you, we do fireside chats that actually try to get new companies to come in and pitch to you. So lots of things going on and hopefully more soon.
Jason Jacobs: I'm going to try another analogy just because I'm curious which aspects of these resonate with you and then which ones you take issue with. So how do you think about, say, if I said Lambda School for climate? How do you react to that?
Anshuman Bapna: I think there are parts of climate that could eventually become like a Lambda School. So I love the income-sharing agreement, how it kind of aligns incentives for both the school and for the learner. The thing that the unit that is most easy to align around is typically dollars, and they're easy to measure, you can figure out what kind of business model structure would actually allow that and so on. In climate, I think there are parts of it where, for example, if I were to say data science and climate, to me it feels like we could potentially run some program that promises that if we transition you into climate work at the end of this, and we are within a certain band of what you were making before. There could be a certain percentage cut that Terra could keep and, therefore, there's no fee for the program itself.
I think it just feels like that so far that space is not very large. I think the general perception, and we're doing a survey on that right now, the general perception is that, well, if you move from wherever you are right now into climate, then you take a compensation cut, because you get it back in your mission orientation, which interestingly is not entirely true. I think that's changing very, very rapidly. But I think we … we are some ways from doing an income-sharing agreement or an ISA kind of a structure.
Also, I think, I sometimes worry about whether it corrupts the entire mission in the first place. So, for example, I mean when your business model becomes your reality, so for example, if we find amazing people, I mean there's one graduate of ours who has, for example, come in from India who ended up starting the Green New Deal for India, policy work. Now there is no ISA that will ever encompass that, and at the beginning we'll all be happy about the fact that this is a successful story from one of our graduates. But when you start looking at the business model through an ISA lens, you'll start focusing less and less on individuals like that. And that's my worry, which is that unless we've come up with a new metric which is not dollars but climate impact, we will … come up with a business model that we will soon become slaves to ourselves. So it's a bit of a conundrum.
Jason Jacobs: Well, I guess the obvious follow-up question then is right now, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a tuition model where the learner is paying, and if that's true, how do you reconcile that with your desire for inclusivity?
Anshuman Bapna: That's something which I struggle with all the time, Jason. So I think we're trying a couple of different things. One is that this time we have started something called a climate sponsor program, which is five individuals, very well known entrepreneurs that you can now see on our website, who are now in the second phase looking at climate solutions and having an impact on them, sponsoring one fellow in every program. Now, if that works, and the idea is that at the end of the program these individuals go and work on a specific problem with these individuals. So you get to work with Emmanuel, who's the founder of Dashlane, or Jeff Rinehart who's the founder of City Light, a venture capital, or Deep Kalra who's the founder of MakeMyTrip and so on, and you get to work with these individuals. And if this program works, then we could potentially expand that to have a lot many more people come in through sponsorships by individuals.
I think there is another model which is potentially in there that could make it a lot more inclusive, which is take our horizontal program and make it openly available to everyone on the planet. So it turns out that I mean even now, I don't know of a single climate program which is comprehensive enough and yet it's so large in breadth that will allow you to kind of get up to speed very quickly on everything climate, and maybe we should take our core program, the horizontal program that we have and allow anyone to be able to access that for free, and that's how you get more and more people into it. I think the interesting problem would be and, Jason, you would appreciate this a lot more, is that we think the end goal is not learning but that community where you all sit in which is very high action orientation community.
So you almost need a "proof of work" like using the crypto language, you need proof of work to be part of that community. And you could come from any background. You could be a farmer in Ghana and you should be part of that community if you have that … show and demonstrate that proof of work. And that's what we're trying to devise what that might be for climate for … to build this community, which is not necessarily coming in by paying $1,500. They could be coming in through other mechanisms.
Jason Jacobs: If you were to … and I've not taken a Terra.do course. I probably should. By the way, just from a vocabulary standpoint, you call it taking a course or what is the action that one takes if they participate in the program? How do you describe it?
Anshuman Bapna: Taking a course.
Jason Jacobs: Taking a course. Okay. So if you were to look with a critical eye today objectively, what are the things that you feel like are working well with Terra.do and then what are the things that you hope and plan to improve upon over time?
Anshuman Bapna: I mean from my eye, hardly anything is working well as far as I'm concerned because I'm always kind of the- the scale of the problem and the urgency of the problem is so high, but I think the core thing that seems to work well is how pedagogically we deliver the programs. So we here … we get a very high NPS ratings, we get very high referral loops, we get lots of word of mouth. So that part I feel reasonably confident that we have gotten most of it right and we'll keep improving and so on.
I think the two things that I struggle with, one is on the do side, which is there's a reason why we call it Terra.do and not Terra.learn. The whole objective is to now take all of these people going through all of these different programs and get them into high climate impact opportunities. Now I think there we're just beginning that journey right now, and it seems like every once in a while people go out and start companies, people go out and start organizations, etc., etc., but we haven't yet cracked the method to that madness yet and, therefore, hopefully 2021 is going to be a lot about that.
And I think the second thing is we still need to figure out where the "real business" in this entire thing is, and if you put on kind of a pure business hat, it seems like a lot of it would be in up-skilling employees sitting in corporations that are going to be impacted by climate. Now our current approach and the way we've structured the whole thing and our own mindset and our own DNA is a very B2C kind of a DNA. And yet there is this enterprise corporate learning world out there, which I almost shudder to think about sometimes, because I once did enterprise sales and swore for the rest of my life I'll never touch that again. But it seems like that might be a path that we'll have to understand and crack this year for this to truly become a scale business.
Jason Jacobs: Well, I have a one idea for you on that front that we can talk about offline but … and we wrestle with some of the same stuff because we also have a B2C focus, but we also have more and more big companies who want to be involved in some way, and I think we have mixed feelings because on the one hand you need that kind of leverage and resource and on the other with those dollars come expectations and possibly compromised objectivity that we're not willing to sacrifice. So … but we want to be big and strong because that's the way we maximize our impact. So it's a double-edged sword. It's a lot to think about. But one other question for you is just in terms of … and I guess you addressed this somewhat already because you said that you look for less about pedigree and more about intent. But for anybody listening who might want to participate in a program, who do you want to hear from, how should they go about applying, and what do you want them to hear or know before they do so to assess whether it might be a good fit?
Anshuman Bapna: Fantastic. I think we would love to get two kinds of people to hear this and reach out to us. One is program creators, especially in the MCJ community exactly as you said, there are activists, there are advanced nuclear physicists, and there are everything in between. And we would love to have more of those programs taught by people who are really passionate about this space. So if you believe that that's something that you might want to do on the Terra platform, please reach out to me. I would love to kind of figure out a way to get you up there.
I think the second from a learner's standpoint one big segment that we think is missing from our typical cohorts is the PPOC community, and we think that is probably underrepresented in tech, and because our outreach mostly has been in kind of the tech world so far and a little bit outside of that, we haven't really seen this wave of these individuals who come from these diverse perspectives and that is so critical to our … not just to the climate solutions but literally to our pedagogy. We actually force people into these very unusual groupings inside the program, because that's the only time they would meet people with such different backgrounds and different ways of looking at the world. And we feel that we haven't really a large enough pool of those kind of individuals. So please, if you're considering this and there are all these scholarships that we have that we would love to extend to you if you consider applying for the program.
Jason Jacobs: And then separate from applying for the program, just for anybody listening who's inspired by what you're doing, where do you need help and who else might you want to hear from?
Anshuman Bapna: Maybe I should step back and say, look, we were very clear even before the pandemic happened was that Terra was going to be a proof point for what Terra the learning company is, which is our belief that you can take talented people across the world and get them to work remotely, collaboratively in solving hard problems. And therefore, the company itself is completely distributed. I have not even met my co-founder ever in my life before. So one of my co-founders she lives in Hawaii and we're across eight different timezones, 12 people.
But the interesting thing about the way we onboard people is that we live in Slack, and anytime somebody reaches out to us and says, look, I'm willing to help you with something that you need help with, we instead of trying to go through this entire interview process and making this binary call one way or the other, we just invite them to our Slack, and say, look, here's this channel where you'll see all kinds of problems being thrown around. Pick the one that you like and get started working on it as independently as possible. Let's reconnect two weeks after you've picked up a problem. And if it turns out to be something that you're finding interesting and we find value in it, we'll convert that into a paid consulting engagement. And if that paid consulting engagement at the end of three months sounds like something that you're enjoying and we're enjoying, we'll convert that into a full-time job. And of the 12 people that we have, roughly four or five have actually come through that part, which is a very interesting new way of hiring people, especially in mission-driven organizations.
So we have a ton of problems to solve. So, for example, one … just to give you an example. So the oil and gas transition that's happening right now, we're trying to get on top of it to understand, well, where are these individuals, what kind of skills are they looking for to get retrained into, and what's the existing ecosystem looks like. If it's an area that you're either familiar with or interested in, reach out to us. Now take that, multiply it by 10 different sectors that we're looking at right now. All of these individually are problem statements that we want to get solved as quickly as possible. And we're going to list on our own website a bunch of projects that we would need help with. So if you see that and you find that interesting, please reach out.
Jason Jacobs: Well, I feel like we've covered a lot of ground. I've definitely learned a lot and my gears are cranking in terms of all the different exciting possibilities here, both for you and even things that we might do together one day, but what haven't I asked that I should have or do you have any other parting words for listeners that we haven't already discussed?
Anshuman Bapna: One thing I've always felt is that often entrepreneurs are … I mean we … in popular culture we talk about how they see an inefficiency in the market. It's actually … that sounds like a very transactional way of putting it. In my opinion, entrepreneurs actually see an injustice in the world out there, and they are trying to correct that injustice. So the question that I would love for you to ask me is what's the injustice that I see or saw that prompted me to get into climate in … in this way. And the answer to that that I would give is that …
Jason Jacobs: Hypothetically, of course.
Anshuman Bapna: Hypothetically [laughs].
Jason Jacobs: [laughs]
Anshuman Bapna: I love that like … it's like what are your biggest strengths. So it's like, oh, I don't know where to start. But the injustice that I saw, and I kind of want to hold on to that so that I don't forget especially one now that I'm sitting in silicon valley is this sense that in climate, mitigation gets a lot of attention and rightly so. And wheels of capitalism turn beautifully in most parts of mitigation, or they've begun to turn beautifully now in that direction.
In adaptation, that problem looks completely different. And the moment we talk about that, we start instead of thinking in terms of decarbonization and the entire kind of how the entire economy could be regarded, the moment you go into adaptation, you start talking in terms of Kate Raworth's doughnut economics kind of models, like what is thriving all about. And I feel that we still haven't come to grips with that. And the sad part is that if I look at what's happening in India, which is going to be one of the countries that's phenomenally impacted by climate change and already has been, but the conversation is entirely about mitigation. It's not about adaptation, because we've borrowed a lot of the language that's happening in mainstream media.
So a lot of the attention on the biggest human misery and human impact that's already happening because of climate change is now relegated to the social justice circles, and these two worlds don't meet at all. And that's something which I feel that if I could correct that in some small way through Terra that would be a really powerful contribution as far as I'm concerned.
Jason Jacobs: Anshuman, this was a really terrific discussion, long overdue, and I'm so glad that we had you on the show. And I'm also just excited to see the progress that you continue to make and hopefully find more ways that we can collaborate together as well since it … as you said, it's kind of chocolate and peanut butter and a lot of similarities to our journeys and missions.
Anshuman Bapna: Absolutely, Jason. And I've been a big fan of how you've been building out in public and so much that I've learned from you and from the MCJ community. So I think this will be … and I proudly hold the card of being the 13th member on your Slack community. So thank you so much for all your sharing.
Jason Jacobs: Well, likewise. Well, thanks again, sir, and best of luck to you and to the Terra.do team.
Anshuman Bapna: Thank you, Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone. Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co Note, that is dot co, not dot com. Someday we'll get the dot com, but right now dot co. You can also find me on Twitter at @jjacobs22 where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
