Climate Careers: Lyndall Schreiner, Director of Product at Afresh & Founder at Earthrise School
Today's guest is Lyndall Schreiner, Director of Product at Afresh & Founder at Earthrise School.
In 2018, Lyndall had her climate aha moment after the IPCC 1.5 Degree Report came out. She was invested in redirecting her career to focus on climate. After 18 months of learning as much as she could about climate and volunteering with the Sunrise Movement, Lyndall landed at Afresh as Director of Product. Afresh is a startup focused on using AI to eliminate food waste in the supply chain. Lyndall also started Earthrise School, which offers individual and group coaching for people who want to pivot their careers to focus on the climate emergency.
Lyndall is a fantastic guest as she successfully transitioned her career into climate and now helps others do the same. In this episode, Lyndall walks me through her "aha" moment, the experience volunteering with the Sunrise Movement, and how she founded Earthrise School. We also talk about her experience transitioning to a startup and finding the right fit for her needs. We also dive into her approach, where she found success, what she learned along the way, and advice she has as a career coach. For anyone looking to make a career shift towards climate, Lyndall has a wealth of knowledge, and this episode is a must-listen.
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 March 26th, 2021.
In Today's episode, we cover:
Lyndall's recent career shift and what sparked it
Sunrise movement, how Lyndall got involved, and what she did while volunteering
How Earthrise School got started and the overall timeline of Lyndall's career transition
Challenges that arose as Lyndall transitioned into a climate startup from a large company in an unrelated sector
The different avenues one can take when changing careers from advocating within companies for more sustainable practices to joining an early-stage startup
How to distinguish between greenwashing and attainable climate initiatives and zero-emission commitments
Advice and expectations Lyndall gives when working with clients through Earthrise School
How to incentives people to shift their careers into climate
What doesn't exist today that Lyndall thinks would be instrumental in helping people make career transitions into climate
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Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason, here. I am the My Climate Journey 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 there 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 1300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screen for, determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, 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 nonprofits 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 on the Climate Career series is Lyndall Schreiner. Lyndall is an avid MCJer as we call it or a member of the My Climate Journey community. She also is a time product leader in the technology industry. Most recently at Lyft and like so many others, Lyndall was having a harder and harder time not putting climate change front and center with her occupation.
This episode talks about Lyndall's journey from working in the technology industry, to volunteering at the Sunrise Movement, founding Earthrise School, and offering coaching for people that are trying to transition into putting climate front and center. And also now working at Afresh, a company that has climate and sustainability as a core focus as well. We've a great discussion in this episode about Lyndall's journey, her approach, what worked, what didn't work. Some of the lessons learned along the way, some of what she's observed in the people that she's been coaching and what's most successful for them, and also some advice that little has for others that are looking to follow down a similar path. Lyndall, welcome to the show.
Lyndall Schreiner: Thank you. It's great to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Well, great to have you. And you've got such an interesting story as well, and you're an active MCJer and kind of living and breathing the ethos of what we're all about and setting a great example for all of us. So I'm excited personally, both to introduce your story to anyone that doesn't know, but also just to learn more about it myself.
Lyndall Schreiner: Thank you.
Jason Jacobs: Well, for starters, tell us a bit about what you're doing today, but let's not get too far down that path. Like let's just talk about that for context, and then I want to go on the way back machine.
Lyndall Schreiner: Fantastic. So I have sort of two pieces of work at the moment. One very related to this conversation is I am a coach for leaders and future leaders in the climate space, helping them get out of overwhelm and really find the most powerful position for them to have impact. So I've been working with people over the last 18 months, helping them figure out their own climate journey and where to plug into the space, trying to get the down from sort of 18 month journey that I think a lot of people go through when they start looking at climate down to kind of a three to four month journey to get plugged in. And then my boots on the ground work 'cause I'm Director of Product at a climate tech company called Afresh where we're using AI to eliminate food waste in the supply chain, which is one of the biggest opportunities to reduce emissions based on the draw down solution list.
Jason Jacobs: But you worked for many years and until recently you were not focused on climate change professionally, correct?
Lyndall Schreiner: Correct. That's right.
Jason Jacobs: So maybe talk a little bit about how that transition came about and when that transition came about. And even before the transition, I mean, did you always care about this problem or where did all this come from and start?
Lyndall Schreiner: I grew up in South Africa and had always had an upbringing that was very outdoorsy, very focused on conservation. And I cared about climate as an issue kind of intellectually for a long time. Back in 2015, I ran a zero waste blog for a while, but really still had a mental model that was around kind of incremental change versus understanding the scale of the issue. And in 2018, when the IPCC 1.5 Degree Report came out, that was my big, "Aha, I need to shift moment." I think a lot of people had 2018 as there turning point as a result of both that report and all the media around it. And I spent three months just trying to figure out what to do. Looking at, "Should I be changing my career? Should I be going back to school? What's the most important lever that I can work on? It's clearly the problem of our lifetime." And came out of that three months with the perspective that the political lever is like the biggest one to pull.
Jason Jacobs: During that three months, was that just kind of nights and weekends while you continued to have a day job paying the bills?
Lyndall Schreiner: Yeah, absolutely. Still had a day job, but would spend all my free time kind of reading, listening to podcasts, watching films, trying to understand everything I could in the space.
Jason Jacobs: And so you came out feeling like politics was the biggest lever. I want to talk about that, but I also want to talk about that process of how you got to that place and maybe some of the things that you evaluated on the way. Any order you want to tackle those.
Lyndall Schreiner: So in terms of process, I think it was... As I was kind of going through all these different resources, it was clear to me that we still needed some good innovation, but what resonated with me a lot was the concept that we actually have a lot of the technologies that we need to be carbonized today. But the scale at which we deploy them, that's never been done before, except with large scale government action. And so I came away from it saying like, "We have to have a coordinated government response in order to have the scale of change that we want."
Jason Jacobs: And so once you got to that place, then what'd you do next?
Lyndall Schreiner: So this was coming into 2019. The research I did was at the end of 2018. And coming out of that, I looked at all the different, a number of different kind of political organizations around activism and like things like 350.org, Sunrise Movement, and found that the Sunrise Movement strategy really resonated with me. And I spent all of 2019 volunteering with the Sunrise Movement, which was while I still had my day job. I didn't think about changing my professional career at that time. I just thought about, "How do I create time to learn about the politics and how to change the politics?" That was an incredible experience for me, both because Sunrise Movement runs a lot of really good training about how to move politics quickly and on the climate crisis overall. So I was embedded with this community of people who were focused on shifting the political conversation and training up a much larger cohort of people to understand climate change.
Jason Jacobs: And what was it about the Sunrise Movement that spoke to you and then tactically, what kind of work were you doing when you were volunteering for that organization?
Lyndall Schreiner: Overall, the Sunrise Movement had a really, really clear strategy that I've never seen from a sort of nonprofit or activist organization before. They understood and had mapped out sort of the politics of the 20th century in America, what type of different political alliances had happened at different times and had really identified kind of where leverage points were, where support was and how to target and shift certain groups. So for me, it was incredibly well thought out and incredibly strategic, which was something that I hadn't seen before. And that resonated very, very strongly with me. And primarily the Sunrise Movement uses direct action. It's a direct action organization to put pressure on different political leaders, as well as to build community and build momentum behind ideas. And so I was working in the Bay Area, expanding our team here. So doing basically onboarding and retention of new members into the Sunrise Movement.
Jason Jacobs: And then it sounds like both there was a professional transition, but there was also this kind of... I don't know if you call it side work, but the coaching practice that you've been building. What order did those come about, and when did those kind of out, and why did you make the choices that you did?
Lyndall Schreiner: After it's been a year working with the Sunrise Movement in all of my spare time coming into 2020, I really wanted to align my day job with the work that I was doing outside. Those two were starting to feel really disconnected. And obviously the work that you do is a good number of your waking hours. My Sunrise Movement was not going to pay the bills or my activist work was not going to pay the bills, so I needed to keep having a job, but I wanted that to be aligned with the work that I was doing outside. So coming into 2020, I started looking for roles in the climate tech space. My background is in product or wanted to see where I could have impact using all the skills that I'd learned. So that was kind of when the professional shift happened. And the coaching piece is a little bit more kind of a personal thing that I've been interested in for a while.
So I'd been training as a coach out of interest. I love working with people, I love developing people and had started a coaching training a while back. And as I was going through this process was realizing a lot of other people needed support as they were going through it too. It's a challenging transition to make. And I think very overwhelming for a lot of folks and focusing my coaching practice on people who were making that transition as well as leaders in the space has been a really nice kind of compliment to the work that I've been doing professionally.
Jason Jacobs: So, if I'm hearing right and correct me, I don't want to overly simplify the story or get it wrong, but it sounds like you went through the transition yourself and then after going through it, you realized that there were a number of other people that were trying to go through a similar transition. And so you then evolved into helping them make the transition that you had gone through yourself, maybe giving them advice and guidance that you wish you had as you were going through it. Is that, is that a reasonable way to describe it?
Lyndall Schreiner: Yeah, exactly. Helping others kind of figure out that path. And I think it's what I was noticing in the tech world is that there are a lot of folks who are... Enjoy their job, have great skills, but really are seeking something more impactful and looking from the sidelines, wanting to jump in. And really wanted to be able to build something that could encourage them to make that leap.
Jason Jacobs: So for you, as you were going through your process, what were some of the most challenging parts and what did you feel was missing as you were going through it that would have potentially made it easier for you?
Lyndall Schreiner: Certainly one of the challenging parts for me was making the move from sort of post IPO BigTech to a startup. I had to be very clear on what was and what wasn't important to me in that transition. Yeah. And I think like as people are making this transition, it's hard to have exactly the perfect role and the same pay and the perfect team when you're moving from a big company to a much smaller company. So getting really clear on what matters to you, I think is really, really important if you're going into the kind of tech space, which is primarily a lot of small companies right now.
There's obviously a bunch of big players, but funding has increased so much over the last couple of years that there's a lot of really small players to work with. So that was one piece. And then the second piece was figuring out where I, as a software product manager could be most impactful. And I think a lot of software folks have this challenge of looking at the space and seeing what looks like and what is a very physical world problem and taking that and saying, "Okay, well, where can I apply software skills within that in a way that's really impactful?"
Jason Jacobs: And the first piece about going from big company to small companies is that specific to climate tech, or is that really going to any startup?
Lyndall Schreiner: It's going to any startup. I think what the challenge is, if you specifically one to climate impact, there are much more opportunities right now I think in smaller companies, apart from the Teslas and the Samarans than there are necessarily in big companies. So if you're someone in tech, who's like looking at the career ladder and you might be wanting to leave your company, but you're in BigTech and you're really focused on like taking the career ladder, then climate tech is a really hard move to necessarily get those things aligned. So I think you have to be willing to like take a bit of a risk to find a team that you really like and might need to go to a setup, which if you weren't specifically looking for this type of impact, you might not necessarily wanting to be going to a smaller company. Does that make sense?
Jason Jacobs: It makes sense. If you want to work on a product that is climate specific, but to play devil's advocate. What about the large companies that aren't climate companies and getting them to do more that is sustainable and in line with a decarbonized economy? So I'll take Stripe as one example and their climate effort or some of the internal activism that's been happening ground up at Amazon, or we had on one of the co-founders of Lyme who ended up establishing a sustainability team and now runs that organization within Lyme. So, I mean, is hitting the rip cord and getting into an earlier stage startup the only way or are there opportunities to bring about change in these larger organizations that are not climate focused as their central offering as well?
Lyndall Schreiner: Absolutely. There are definitely opportunities at bigger companies. I think, again, it depends kind of what's important to you and why you're looking for. For me, I really wanted to find a company where the way that, that company's business model was really aligned with the impact that I wanted to have and wasn't like a secondary side thought for the company. So that was for me, something that was really important. I definitely think on the activism, within a company, there's a ton of opportunity to have huge impact, especially with some of the big players. And then I think with, on the sustainability side of companies, I think that, that's one area where I think he needs to be a little bit careful.
So I think that there are some companies that are doing really, really good work in that space. And then I've also spoken to people who are in that, in those types of roles where they're frustrated by the greenwashing that's happening or the company's not actually putting resources behind it. So finding a company that... I think was really important if you would go in that route, to find a company that's actually putting real resources behind it. And as you've mentioned, there are a number that are doing that.
Jason Jacobs: And maybe this is outside of your expertise. So if it is, that's fine, but any advice on how to tell if you're maybe looking at a company in that type of role, how to know which ones are for real and which ones are maybe more on the greenwashing side?
Lyndall Schreiner: I think one is resources and willingness to put real money behind it internally. And the second one is if the company is interested in plans that have near term hard decisions that they're willing to take. So if a company is putting together plans around kind of 2040, and no interim steps to get there, it's probably going to be a frustrating phase to be in the next five years. If they are thinking about plans for de-carbonization on the 2030 timeframe with interim steps, then those companies are, I mean, my perspective, I think those companies are much more willing to be actually making change. And you can argue if you're in a company that is not yet putting real resources behind it, there's an opportunity to push the company that way. And then I think that that's where the kind of internal activism matters. I think to do that successfully, you need to build a coalition of support amongst the employees rather than being kind of an individual or just part of that team pushing it forward.
Jason Jacobs: And you talked a little bit about trade-offs, how the best people and the best pay and doing the most impactful work and things like that. So, I mean, when you are coaching people and giving them that advice, how do you set expectations with them? Should they strive to check every box or should they recalibrate their expectations? What are you seeing out and how do you counsel people that are trying to make this change?
Lyndall Schreiner: So, the first thing I would say is on team, I think almost everyone can tick that box. The people in the climate tech space are outstanding, both in terms of skills and in terms of just being really good people. That's one that I think people don't need to make trade-off on. And there are absolutely people who find kind of the perfect everything they're looking for. But when I'm coaching folks what we do is really get clear on the ordering of what's really important. So what does absolutely non-negotiable, what is nice to have and in what order are they important? Because I think particularly when people are moving to a smaller company and I think this has moving to startups in general, one might not have like tick all the perfect boxes in year one. May very well have a lot of opportunities in year two and year three, particularly if it's high growth, but so long as they're meeting kind of what those non-negotiables are, then I think there's opportunity to figure out the rest once you get into the space.
Jason Jacobs: So in other words, it's not like you definitely need to take a salary hit or things like that. It's kind of like for each person, they have a different set of priorities. And then depending on how they stack, stack rank, those priorities, there's a different set of trade-offs and maybe a different sea of opportunities to consider.
Lyndall Schreiner: Yeah, exactly. And each individual is different. There are some people who perhaps might not be able to go and work at a startup right now, but they might be able to go down to four days a week at their current organization and work on a volunteer project one day a week, that's going to teach them a ton about the space and move another project forward. I think that there are so many different ways to be able to contribute in ways that work for you, if you can get really clear on what's important.
Jason Jacobs: And do you think for someone that has spent their career in software, trying to transition into climate tech, would your advice be to focus on bits or should they broaden their purview? I mean, there are some companies that have software as a component, but it isn't the center of the bullseye in terms of where the product resources that are primarily focused in the organization. Is that a flag? Is that a warning sign? If I've spent my career in software, how should I think about that if you were counseling me on making this transition?
Lyndall Schreiner: I like to think of it as kind of sort of three legs of a stool almost where you've got kind of your role and your expertise of what you're good at, industry of what you know, and then kind of criteria more around like title. Like, are you trying to move into a manager role or not? And I think that you can shift, it's quite easy to shift one of those at the time. And so I don't think there's an answer that's for everyone, but what I would say is move into the space as quickly as possible. And if that is where software isn't like, it is supporting part of the company, but isn't the most important thing, but that's what you're already good at moving into the space.
There's tons of people that move laterally as they move through their career. But I think it's easier to kind of shift into the space, start learning about the space, you'll know so much more after working for a year in this space than you will right now. And if like, what you're really good at is software, there are tons of opportunities to do that and to start learning about different industries and sectors that are going to be important for de-carbonization.
Jason Jacobs: From what you observe, the veterans who've been working in some aspects of climate for a long time, and then the new blood that's coming in from Silicon Valley or other places, is there a culture clash of sorts? Are the mindsets different, is the pace different, is the tolerance for risk different or is everyone generally kind of speaking the same language?
Lyndall Schreiner: Honestly, I don't have a great opinion on that. I certainly haven't seen a lot of clashes that are happening, but most of the people that I've been working with have been new people into the space and typically moving more into the startup realm.
Jason Jacobs: And how's it been going for your clients? Are they having an easy go of it? Are they having successful outcomes? Are they getting frustrated and going and putting their head back down and ad tech, what kind of success rates or anecdotal stories can you share from clients that you've worked with recently? And obviously don't mention any names or say anything that's confidential.
Lyndall Schreiner: No one's taken about turn and gone back to ed tech. Everybody's continuing to do work and move into the space. The people who've been most successful are the people who are willing to move to action really quickly. And some folks are actually doing a bit more of a pivot. Some folks are staying within their space, but the ones that are kind of willing to jump in and just start finding work are typically more successful about making that transition.
Jason Jacobs: And structurally, do you think it's better just to kind of let it happen naturally. And when people pick their head up and they raise their hand, then give them resources to help, or do you think it's important to try to foster an environment that's more conducive to more people picking their head up? And if that second part is the case, then what changes would need to be made to make that possible or said another way, what are some of the barriers holding more people back from taking the leap?
Lyndall Schreiner: I think the community aspect of it is incredibly important. One of the things that I see frequently with my clients is when they're talking, a lot of people are coming out of tech feeling somewhat isolated. So they've decided they care a lot about climates, but perhaps not all their friends do all their work colleagues. And if they keep going to the same people in their network for advice, they're not going to get advice that brings them into the climate space. And so I think My Climate Journey, Come into Action Tech, Work on Climate, there's such important communities for folks to get involved with, to see other people who are on this journey, who are further head on this journey and act as a pole to keep moving towards the space versus getting put off, moving away from it. So I think that's piece number one, that's kind of most important.
I think the other thing, if we could build out as people who are working in this space is more opportunities to be able to test out the space. So some of the people that I've worked with who've had really good success have taken on either volunteer projects one day a week as their first step. I have had one person I worked with who was moving from tech to policy and took on a volunteer project, which kind of is making him an expert on the space that he's working on much more effective than going back to school to make the transition he's just starting in. Another person I work with is doing contract work in the space. He has sort of a project that he wants to run. So there's lots of these.... I think these opportunities to take a three month project, that's not necessarily changing your career straight away, but allowing you to learn a ton about the space, allowing you to network and build out peers and co-collaborators in the space, keeps people involved and gives people then kind of a stepping stone to whatever's next for them that they didn't have before.
Jason Jacobs: We've talked about some of the tools and communities and stuff that are valuable, but what doesn't exist that you wish existed?
Lyndall Schreiner: Definitely more of these opportunities being created for folks. I think kind of more mentorship. Where I see a sticking point is folks getting stuck in kind of what I call book learning, reading about climate, going to advance in the climate space for kind of 18 months before like diving in and doing things and getting people mentorship to get people over that hump to say, "Do this project, dive into this piece," helping folks get from that book learning to action. Accelerating that I think is the most important part. And I think that folks need kind of mentorship to get there.
Jason Jacobs: And if you didn't have a day job and you didn't have this coaching practice and you wanted to tackle that problem, what would you build?
Lyndall Schreiner: Yeah. Maybe it's a cohort of people who have made this transitional already who can hold the hands of folks coming through it themselves. I can imagine a world where you could have mentors kind of working with four or five people at a time as a group who have like similar backgrounds. Somehow similar skill sets and helping them kind of navigate through the space, I think is really important for people who are going through this journey to meet each other as well, rather than trying to navigate it all on their own. So I think those small kind of cohorts of people coming through mentored by people who have done this already would be very valuable. It's high touch. That's like a hard model to scale you use get a lot of folks on board, but I do think climate crisis is overwhelming for a lot of people and getting that step from looking from the outside, "How do I solve this?" To really being fully immersed and committed to the space is the tough change for some people, particularly if you don't know anything about it.
Jason Jacobs: What do you think of the on-deck model?
Lyndall Schreiner: I don't know the On-deck model super well. I know that they have their fellowship and that it's sort of aimed at kind of founders in the space, which I think is great. And I know that there's like textiles accelerators for founders in the space. I think that there's sort of a bit missing for people who don't necessarily want to be founders not necessarily their skillset or what they're able to do right now, but want to work in the space and find out where they can kind of have more impact. And I'm not sure that there is yet a lot of stuff that's aimed at them.
Jason Jacobs: Do you know much about Terra.do and what they're doing?
Lyndall Schreiner: Yes. I love the folks there. I think they're doing really great work in giving people a bootcamp on climate and helping them navigate the space. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Nice. Yeah. Directionally, these are also problems that we see and also opportunities that we see and directionally, I think we also want to do more. And one of the things that we're working through is just what are the things that we will do versus just kind of pointing people to the great people that are already doing great work in this area and either pointing to at minimum or integrating more elegantly or maybe co-branded offerings or things like that. We're not interested in reinventing the wheel or in elbowing anybody out. We're just interested in giving our members more tools that they need to get better results, whether it comes from us or not.
Lyndall Schreiner: I think that the work you did on Climate and Careers, I think hearing other people's stories is incredibly valuable for folks who are looking from the outside. I think when a lot of people approach the space from the beginning, they think they need to be a hardware engineer or a scientist. And being able to see people who've made similar transitions with their skillset is super valuable. And I know Ty is also doing the office hours and mentorship through that, which I think is also super, super valuable.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And I mean one tactical question, but just, you mentioned trying to find software opportunities that put climate front and center. What tools or resources did you use to uncover opportunities? What was most effective for you?
Lyndall Schreiner: For software opportunities in particular Climatebase is fantastic. For those who are listening, who don't know, they're a jobs board for jobs in the climate space. A lot of their companies are software companies, often a mix of software and hardware as well. And the other thing that's becoming really useful is VC portfolio pages, looking at the companies that elemental and lower carbon have invested in. They've also got kind of their job boards associated with those portfolio companies, which is another great place to look. And Terra.do has also started a career fair. We attended that as Afresh and I know other companies and software space are attending that. So that's also a fantastic opportunity to meet people more close up.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And anything I didn't ask you that I should have, or any final piece of advice for people that are either thinking about in the process of trying to make the transition into a climate career?
Lyndall Schreiner: The two biggest things that I've seen being helpful is one, I said this, and I'll keep saying it, moving to action really quickly. If you're coming new to the space, give yourself a time box for how long are you going to spend reading and researching and then switch over to find a project to work on or that you think is important. It doesn't need to be the forever project, but you'll learn so much more from doing something then from watching from the sidelines. And then the other piece is it's such a collaborative community. For instance, climate tech, I'm always amazed at how generous people are with their time, how collaborative people are between competing companies. It's an incredible community. Start reaching out to folks, start meeting people, both who are going through those with you and who are a bit ahead of you or much further ahead of you in the space.
But I think getting plugged in and meeting people will kind of keep pulling you forwards as you move towards the space. I think one other thought kind of coming back to your question of what people need to exist in this space. When I was interviewing people who made this transition, one of the people who I interviewed, he's an engineering manager at Ecosia talked a lot about cross-functional teams. And what Ecosia does, they're a web browser that's creates revenue that they use for reforestation. And he said, you know, he wanted to work on something that was around reforestation, but he was a software engineering manager. He doesn't need to be the person who also knows about trees. He just needs to find someone to work with who can be part of that. And I think that the types of teams we need to put together in climate look very different from some of the types of teams that we've needed to put together in tech generally, to build ad tech or others.
And so I think some folks as you come into the space might feel overwhelmed by, "I don't have the right skills." Everybody has skills that are valuable. We're changing our whole economy, but the sign to find what skills don't you have for the problem you want to solve and how do you find those people? I think would be a really big unlock. And if we could build things that connect people who are perhaps coming from the tech space with folks who have some of those real world skills or coming from the software space with the real world skills, whether that's ecological, whether that's around water, whether that's around carbon capture, putting those people together and seeing what happens, I think is also a super valuable place for us to be in investing as a community.
Jason Jacobs: From a coaching standpoint, are you currently taking on new clients, anything you want to share for people that might benefit from your services?
Lyndall Schreiner: Yeah, I am currently taking on new clients. I've also started hosting a Tuesday morning call, which is just a group call for anybody who wants to attend for folks to come and just ask questions about where they are in the climate journey. I've called that Climate Pathfinders, but if anybody wants to come and join, that they're most welcome as well.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And from a demand standpoint, where's the bottleneck when it comes to the coaching, is it a dearth of coaches or is it a dearth of people that are picking their head up and wanting to make this transition? And the reason I ask is, I'm just wondering if this is like a personal trainer where you can train people to do it the Lyndall way and build an army of these coaches that are helping more people transition into working on climate.
Lyndall Schreiner: I think there's definitely more demand than there is people kind of providing coaching or mentoring. I'm also seeing that it's really valuable to move from doing things one-to-one to more of a group session, just because there's so much learning that happens between folks that are moving through the space. But yeah, I would love to in the second half of this year, I'd love to scale up and be able to support more folks going through the space, either through group program or through bringing more people on to support.
Jason Jacobs: Great, well Lyndall, super helpful and informative. Hopefully it's helpful for others trying to make this transition as well. And who knows, maybe you'll also inspire some new people who listen to this show to take that first step. So thank you so much for coming on the show and for the important work that you're doing in climate.
Lyndall Schreiner: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for asking me about my journey and where I'm at, and I absolutely hope that anybody else going through this transition finds this helpful and... Yeah, anything I can do to help.
Jason Jacobs: Well, thanks again.
Lyndall Schreiner: Thank you.
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 .co, not .com. Someday we'll get the.com, but right now, .co. You can also find me on Twitter @jjacob22, 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.
