As companies look to further their sustainability efforts, the co-founder of Wren suggests they take steps that customers view as transparent, honest — and authentic.
In 2021, Landon Brand spoke with Signal 360 to explain how Wren works by offering carbon offsets to anyone, for their commute to work or summer vacation flights. Customers also want to work with companies they perceive as genuine with their sustainability efforts. To Brand, that comes down to one simple thing.
“I think that the easiest way to be perceived as authentic is just to be authentic,” he says.
You can hear more from this conversation in our video below or our lightly edited transcript.
TRANSCRIPT
Laura Rich
I’m excited to welcome today, Landon Brand, who is a co-founder of Wren, a startup focused on climate change solutions. So Landon, welcome. Great to see you.
Landon Brand
Hi, Laura. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited for our conversation today. And to talk about Wren a little bit here.
My pleasure. So, to begin, climate change is an important topic to Generation Z, and Gen Z is something we’re thinking about a lot at Signal 360 right now, because they are the focus of our November issue coming out next week. So I found a Pew Research study that noted that and this isn’t going to be that much of a surprise, but to a much greater degree than other generations, Gen Z, and Millennials see climate change as a top priority. They’re more engaged with content around climate solutions, and they are more likely to take personal action. So Landon, your company helps people do exactly that take personal action around climate change. So can you talk to us about what Wren does, how it works, and what your goals are?
Yeah, so Wren is a website where you can calculate and then offset your carbon footprint. So how it works is you go to our website, you enter in how much you are driving, and flying, and all this other sort of lifestyle information that affects your carbon footprint. When we spit out a number that’s like, ‘Okay, this is your carbon footprint. And this is what it means. And this is how you could maybe reduce it.’ We find that that helps kind of create a context of understanding about how the climate crisis works a little bit and how we all fit into it, as we’re all parts of this really big system. The offsetting component of it is for folks who see their carbon footprint and want to do something pretty easy about it, we just show them some projects that they can fund that are planting trees or protecting rainforest, or otherwise helping with the climate crisis and reducing the amount of C02 in the atmosphere.
So that’s interesting. That sounds a lot like individuals doing what companies do buying carbon offsets. Is that sort of the idea?
There’s definitely parallels and especially this world of carbon offset projects is really interesting, where they’ve existed for decades now. There’s been some regulation existing that says, ‘Hey, if you’re a company and you go over this emissions limits, you have to offset your carbon footprint by that amount.’ It’s called cap and trade. And there’s also many companies recently, especially that have said, ‘Hey, we want to go carbon neutral as a company, we want to take care of our carbon footprint.’ I think the ones, the companies that are really genuine about the climate crisis, usually before going carbon neutral, they say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do to reduce our carbon footprint to fully decarbonize besides just purchasing carbon offsets, here’s what we’re actually doing to create change.’ Then we on the individual side, it’s very similar, where people can see their carbon footprint to kind of see how they fit into the climate crisis. Some folks are interested in just saying, ‘Let’s find these projects that are helping move the needle on the climate crisis.’ In the same way, you’re almost going into a voluntary carbon tax where you’re saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to pay for the emissions that I emit. And that’s also like a nice incentive for me to reduce my emissions too.’
How did Wren get started? Give us your origin story.
We started Wren when my co-founders and I were in college at the University of Southern California. We had seen this big report came out in 2018, from the IPCC that said, ‘Global warming is bad, and it’s getting worse faster than expected.’ And basically all this bad stuff about global warming. We, my co founders, and I said, ‘Let’s see if we can do something about this.’ Our first idea was basically crowdfunding all these solutions to the climate crisis that we’re already ready to go today. We found this amazing resource called Drawdown, they have a website, which is really awesome. It basically listed out 100 solutions to the climate crisis, where if we did all 100 today, we would more than pull down as much C02 as we’re emitting. So in effect, it showed us, we have all the solutions today, we just need to actually fund them to actually make them happen. We havethe technology we need, sure more technology is gonna make it easier. But let’s get started today and start doing something. So we launched Wren then in that summer of 2019, and just launched a very simple page. There’s a very simple calculate your carbon footprint component and a few projects you can find. To our surprise people actually signed up, we’re very excited about it, and we’re telling others about it. Then we realized, ‘Okay, we have something here, like, let’s keep doubling down and make it even better and better. And hopefully, we can get millions more people to do something about the climate crisis.’
How many people do you have using your platform?
Right now we’re at about 5000. So it’s got a ways to go to a few million. But the nice thing is it kind of does scale kind of exponentially. We’re optimistic about growing a lot over the next few years here.
I think what that 5000 shows is it demonstrates the traction that you need when you go to raise money. You guys have raised money from Union Square Ventures and Y Combinator founder, Paul Graham, congratulations. So I wanted to ask you what the pitch is to investors for a climate change startup, because we’ve heard a lot about VCs getting into clean tech in the early 2000s, and really feeling like they got burned by that. So what’s the climate like for climate change startups with VCs these days?
Great question. So for Wren, and I think a lot of other climate related startups like that, we benefit by the fact that a lot of folks are starting to care more and more about the climate crisis. Drom our own perspective, at Wren, it’s like, the purpose has always been will always be, we want to do as much as we can about the climate crisis and give humanity like the best odds that we can basically. Our investors very much see eye to eye on that, that like this is for a mission. Yes, there are kind of financial returns involved here. But they see the long term view of, ‘It’s much more important to address the climate crisis here.’ I think with a lot of companies addressing the climate crisis, that’s also why you see. If you’re an investor, and you think there’s a chance of return in a company, that is also addressing humanity’s biggest crisis like that’s very exciting thing to work on, very gratifying to spend a lot of time on those sorts of companies. For Wren, specifically, I’d say that the pitch is something like, ‘Hey, we’re building this community, this audience of hopefully, millions of people who really care about addressing the climate crisis. And that’s a really valuable thing.’ Especially over longer periods of time, these individuals are taking more and more action. Some of that action is pretty commercial in terms of buying, like heat pumps, or induction stoves, and all these sort of more typical commercial things. So there’s lots of ways in addition to carbon offsets where we think we can grow. I think that’s partly what makes it an exciting pitch for an investor.
Can you talk a little bit more about that, the value and your business model and how you deliver it back to investors?
Our business model right now is very simple. We just take a 20% fee on the carbon offsets sold through Wren. Right now is just basically going to fund operations. We aren’t profitable yet. We have a long ways to go before we can pay everyone salary just off of that sort of 20% fee. Long term, we also think there’s a lot of other opportunities to monetize as well with almost sort of affiliate revenue type offerings, where we could, for instance, help people choose a more climate friendly bank. A bank is a very revenue generating business, banks make lots of money, and that’s why they’re so big. They pay a lot for acquiring customers also. So this is a very valuable audience for folks like those banks who want to acquire customers who really care about the climate crisis, and might be a perfect fit for what they’re offering.
Let’s talk about who those people are, who would be that fit for them. Basically, how do you how do you describe your use or base and do refer to them as customers or an audience or users.
We probably say, members or supporters most often. Wren members are honestly pretty diverse, which has been surprising. In terms of age, we’re talking everything from college students to folks in their 60s 70s and upward. Generally, it does track with what age people are on the internet is partly a function, they’re like, ‘We very much operate online.’ And it’s a very digital product. So that’s part of the part of who makes up the audience is how accessible it is to different audiences. Another interesting thing is, it’s folks all around the world, who are supporting brands. So I think it’s about 60 to 70%. are people living in the US who are supporting rent, and then a lot of other folks from the UK, from Australia, Canada, Germany, I think if we had Wren in other languages, too, that would open up the audience even more. We’re fortunate to see that there are people who care about climate change all over the world now and with Yeah, all sorts of ages. It’s a pretty diverse group. So even though we do have more work to be done on getting more people to care about the climate crisis front, especially in America, where you have a lot of people who will outright deny the climate crisis. It is cool to see how diverse the existing audience of folks who are really convinced about the climate crisis and ready to take action on it. It’s cool to see how diverse that audience is.
You have also said that you identify as Gen Z. So when we think about Gen Z, as mentioned, sustainability and accountability are two very important factors to them. Have you learned anything about them when it comes to climate change, anything in particular that resonates more with Gen Z, with what you’re doing, what you’ve seen on your platform, or as your own perspective, when it comes to the intersection of Gen Z and climate change?
If you look at who the people who are having the biggest impact on the climate crisis are right now in terms of who are the activists speaking up about it, and really shaping public opinion and changing the minds of millions of people around the world to say, ‘Hey, this is a crisis and we should treat it as such, and we should pass a lot of policy that addresses the climate crisis, and people should like change what they’re doing day to day, to an extent, to deal with the climate crisis?’ A lot of that conversation comes from Gen Z. If you look at what Greta Thunberg has done is she is a 16 year old from Sweden, she’s an activist, and she just decided, every Friday, I’m going to show up, and I’m going to strike and I’m going to talk about climate change until someone actually does something about it. And that’s an attitude that is shared among many other youth activists now. And we really do see them gaining a lot of traction. I think Greta has millions and millions of Instagram followers. Other youth activists also have a ton of Instagram followers and these big audiences, they’re invited to speak at these big events. And so it’s this generation, Gen Z, able to say, ‘We are the ones who are inheriting this planet and everyone else you are living in this planet today, and you are also having the most impact on it.’ But that impact is maybe affecting future generations, a lot more, especially even when you think about how Gen Z is alive today, and they’re kind of already becoming adults, and they’re affected so much, but also, every future generation that of people on earth is going to be affected by what we do in the next 50 years here. I think Gen Z has just done a really good job of telling that story and expressing the importance and urgency of the climate crisis, partly just because they are young. That kind of means they can tell the story of, ‘Look, we are inheriting this planet. You better take care of it for us because we don’t have the power as much in our hands right now.’ And certainly from the Wren perspective, we also see a lot of folks in Gen Z who are more vocal about climate change. And if they sign up for Wren, they might be the folks who also tell their friends about it and try and form groups in Wren to amplify their impact a bit more. It’s almost like we’re seeing this is a generation where everyone is either an activist or is almost feels pressure to be in that activism because we know there are these things wrong about the world, and we want to address them.
How do you ensure Wren is perceived as authentic so your users believe they’re making real change?
I think that the easiest way to be perceived as authentic is just to be authentic. As a public benefit corporation, we have a legally binding charter. And one of our values listed on that charter is to be radically transparent, like, climate change is an issue that affects everyone so organizations working on climate change should just be totally transparent about what they’re doing and why. So we publish how much goes to salary. We don’t literally publish every employee salary, because that’s very sensitive. But we explain how we choose compensation, we show what every dollar we spend kind of goes towards at least in high level, it’d be a little excessive to like, print out every line item of anything we’ve ever spent money on. Maybe one day, though. I think there’s little harm in being overly transparent. And it does help us to be perceived as more authentic, because people can just see, ‘Okay, they are putting their money where their mouth is, here they are, you can tell that they’re trying to do everything they can about the climate crisis, and they are happy to share exactly what they’re doing with everyone.’
Let’s get your view on what businesses are doing right and wrong when it comes to sustainability, and efforts and models that you hold up as, as doing it the right way.
I think there’s a lot of ways for a company to do more about the climate crisis or sustainability in general. On the really good end, I think you have stuff that looks like Patagonia, where basically the company exists, because they say, ‘We are concerned about how clothes are made, we want to make clothes in a very environmentally friendly way. And we want to be the leader there.’ That’s really powerful. It’s really authentic, and it’s received well. People can tell that Patagonia really just cares about saving the planet, that’s core to their mission, and it’s not just something they tacked on. The last thing I’d say is lots of companies are not particularly unsustainable, for instance, a software company it’s, ‘We need to get clean energy.’ But once we have clean energy, like what a software company is doing is probably not affecting the environment that much. And so for those sorts of folks who are sitting on the sidelines and saying, ‘Hey want to help, but it’s not like we’re doing anything too bad that we need to totally transform.’ I think they can look at basically, ‘How can we use more clean energy? How can we how can we fund that clean energy too? And how can we can we look at our carbon footprint as it is and figure out what’s the most important things we can kind of decarbonize and reduce.’ Air travel might be an example where, right now there’s no real sustainable way to do air travel. But a lot of companies do a lot of it. And maybe some of that could be reduced a bit like we saw in COVID, maybe you could reduce that a bit and do more video calls. That would be another way that companies who are more on the sidelines but have a bit of a mission still can take more and more action. And I think going carbon neutral is another great step there. That honestly isn’t too expensive and doesn’t take too much time for most companies too.
And something else that companies do a lot of and this is what we talked about how he’s kicked it off with are carbon offsets. So in our final few minutes that we have here, I wanted to give you a chance to give us an example, maybe your favorite example of a company or an organization or a cause, a project that is part of your portfolio that the carbon offsets that people buy on your platform go to as an example of something a way to think about?
The biggest project we work with, is a tree planting project in eastern Africa. Their model is basically saying, ‘Let’s fund these farmers in East Africa to plant trees on their farms, because there’s been research done that shows when you’re growing trees on your cropland. It’s a practice called agroforestry, it actually usually improves the yields of that cropland. So you can be growing trees that sequester carbon and that increase the yields of your cropland and even our like a nice windbreak or maybe a fruit tree, or a nice piece of shade on your cropland where you want it. So there’s all these sorts of benefits to that project. And it’s a very cost effective way to sequester C02. And those trees, because they’re planted by the farmers who live on that land and who know their farm best, those trees usually last a very long time and grow and grow and grow. It’s not like, with some tree planting projects, you run this risk of like, ‘Well, we plant these trees, and they’ll get chopped down like five years from now.’ But with these projects, because they’re planted by the people who are on that cropland already, and who are planting trees that they know will be just valuable for years and years to come for themselves, that means that there’s lower risks involved with that sort of project, and it creates huge economic benefits, where it’s usually people who are somewhat well off in Western countries who are paying for these carbon offsets. And then these mostly subsistence smallholder farmers who are receiving that money from these carbon offsets that they are growing. That can be life changing amounts of money and in those communities where you can then send your children to get educated, it’s just a great example of a huge win, that’s also very cost effective. There’s this whole system they use to actually go and measure the tree trunks, so they know how much carbon is being sequestered, and that process creates jobs in those communities. It’s a really inspiring project for me, and it’s one also that can just keep scaling and scaling and we can keep growing that model.
I appreciate your sharing that one in detail with us and informing everybody about Wren in this new unique approach to helping people take personal action on climate change and the business model Wren and the business potential of it. We’ve got to wrap up. So thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. This was fun.
