The $200 Trillion Pivot

If you've been reading these logs, you know I've been jumping between ideas like crazy. One month I'm building a marketing tool, the next it's a chrome extension for Reddit. It's been fun but I'm still making no money and (in all honesty) I'm getting disillusioned with the indie hacker route. Maybe it worked to build in public 10 years ago, but now everyone has access to the same tools and knowledge so it's easy to get lost in the noise. As a result, I've recently decided to stop fighting my interests and go back to building in a field that I have an advantage in, and also am passionate about.

See, my career path hasn't exactly been linear.

I started out as a plant scientist at Cambridge. I loved the science, but I really hated the pace and loneliness of working in a lab by myself all the time. So, in a move that confused basically everyone I knew (most notably my parents), I finished my MPhil degree and then immediately... became a banker. I did this for a few reasons. Mostly I liked the idea of being able to afford to not live at home any more, but I also really wanted to understand how money moved around the world. I was only there for a short few months but it was intense, high-speed and actually taught me a lot about how the global economy functions. I also met some really cool people. Despite this, I had to come to terms with the fact that it really wasn't a lifestyle I enjoyed much.

So, I quit that too to become a software engineer and build things on my own terms. This was another crazy change in pace but I'd been teaching myself how to code web apps whilst I was working. In the evenings and weekends, I'd build silly tools and games (some of which are on this website right now).

But through all of this, there was one memory that kept nagging at me.

When I was 15, I went on a one month expedition to Borneo with my secondary school. Around two weeks into the trip, I was sitting on a bus. Yeah I know, what an origin story. Anyways, I was looking out, expecting to see the lush rainforests and animals etc. For around half of the journey, I did get to see some cool stuff. I remember seeing some monkeys and a cool looking bird. But then, all of a sudden it just stopped.

The forest was literally gone. It had been clear cut and the people who were doing it were still standing there and rolling over more trees (and probably animals) with their tractors. It shocked me so much because it wasn't just a patch, but for the entire second half of the 3 hour bus journey I saw the same thing over and over and over. It made me realize that unless nature has a value that can compete with extraction, it will always lose.

That bus ride is why I studied biology in the first place. And it's why I'm pivoting my startup focus now.

Here is my new thesis: Nature is the biggest service provider on Earth.

Estimates suggest that environmental services—things like pollination, carbon sequestration, water filtration and flood control—contribute somewhere between $100 and $200 trillion to the global economy every year.

The problem is that a huge proportion of that value is currently valued at $0.

But that is starting to change. Climate change (especially after 2024) is forcing the global economy to finally account for this. Companies are scrambling to understand their biodiversity impact, governments are mandating carbon reporting and insurance premiums are rising as flood risks increase.

We are moving from an era where nature was free to exploit to an era where nature has to become an asset class that needs to be managed.

So, I'm done building generic SaaS wrappers. I'm going to use my background in science and my skills in code to build tools that help some part of the environment. I'm actually not sure yet what I'm going to work on specifically, but this might be a good thing because so far most of my ideas have been shit.

It's both a tiny and massive market, it's technically so difficult to enter and seems like billion dollar companies are already completely swamping every concievable problem i could try to solve, but for the first time in a while it defintiely feels like I'm starting to work on something that actually matters.