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“Searching” for Climate Action
Ruby Au, Head of North America at Ecosia, discusses how the transition to stakeholder capitalism is enabling more positive impact for people and planet than business as usual. Reflecting on her international experience as an impact and social entrepreneur, Ruby observes how differently business is approached in different cultures, including how the “calculations” tend to take different variables into account, whether formally or informally. At her current post at Ecosia, a social enterprise search engine that dedicates its profits to climate action, Ruby heads their North American division of operations. Learn about climate action, ethical business practices, purpose-driven and service-driven technology companies, and more in this inspiring episode.
CALL TO ACTION
“Make Ecosia.org your default search engine browser!”
– Ruby Au, Head of North America, Ecosia.org
About Ruby Au
Ruby Au is the Head of North America at Ecosia, where she is responsible for Ecosia’s user growth and market strategy across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Prior to joining Ecosia, Ruby worked in Nairobi’s social impact & tech startup scene, where she founded and exited Lumen Labs, a Nairobi-based EdTech company. She later launched the African office for San Francisco startup Endless Computers as their Business Development Lead in Africa. Ruby holds dual degrees in Business and Environmental Science from the University of Southern California.
About Ecosia
Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company based in Berlin, Germany that dedicates 100% of its profits to the planet. It finances tree-planting projects as well as other environmental and social initiatives, such as solar power plants and community-driven climate projects. By offering users a green alternative to search and browse online, Ecosia has been able to plant over 160 million trees worldwide. The company is B-Certified, and maintains high standards of transparency, social responsibility, and environmental stewardship throughout its operations and spheres of influence. Additionally, the company maintains strong data sovereignty practices so that its users are not trailed by the same digital footprint found in other for-profit search engines and digital marketing platforms.
RESOURCES & RELATED PODCAST EPISODES
Chicago project: https://blog.ecosia.org/openlands/
Los Angeles project: https://blog.ecosia.org/urban-tree-equity/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruby-au/
Episode 94 – Tom Chi, At One Ventures
Episode 95 – John Liu, Ecosystem Restoration Camps
Episode 85 – Kate Williams, 1% for the Planet
Episode 65 – Eric Lombardi, Social Enterprise & Protecting the Commons
Episode 96 – John Fullerton, The Capital Institute
Episode 127 – John Perkins, Life Economy vs. Death Economy
IMAGES
TRANSCRIPT
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth community podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today
we’re visiting with the head of North American operations at Ecosia, Ruby. Oh, hi, Ruby.
Hi, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it’s great to have this opportunity to visit
with you and learn about Ecosia, what you guys are doing as a regenerative green sustainable
search engine, and also learn a bit more about what you’re doing as an eco entrepreneur
working in the impact tech nexus. And yeah, really looking forward to our discussion.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to this as well. And I think we’ve had chat a little bit before this
and all the things that you want to touch on are some of the topics I’m most interested in and
passionate about. So let’s let’s get rolling. Sounds great. Ruby Ow is the head of North America
at Ecosia, where she is responsible for Ecosia’s user growth and market strategy across the United
States, Canada, and Mexico. Prior to joining Ecosia, Ruby worked in Nairobi’s social impact and tech
startup scene where she founded an exited Lumen Labs, a Nairobi-based ed tech company. She later
launched the African office for San Francisco startup, Endless Computers, as their business development
lead in Africa. Ruby holds dual degrees in business and environmental science from the University
of Southern California. And Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that dedicates 100 percent
of its profits to the planet. They finance tree planting projects around the world and other
environmental and social initiatives such as solar, power plants, and community-driven climate
projects. By offering users a green alternative to search and browse online, Ecosia has been able
to plant over 150 million trees worldwide. That is quite an impressive number, Ruby. So let’s
start there. Why trees? Why did you guys think it important to create a tech solution that would
help get a lot more trees planted in the ground in the quote-unquote real world?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s such an interesting thing a tree, right? Because you see it all the time
and you don’t really think about it. It just blends in the landscape as part of the day.
But this is something that I’ve really come to appreciate after joining Ecosia is a tree
represents so much more than a tree. It is also a host of ecosystem benefits. So it keeps the soil
down. It cleans the air. It makes the water systems run. It provides fruit or food or, you know,
firewood to communities who meet it. In urban areas, it provides rest and relaxation and kind of
mindfulness and wellness. And of course, it helps draw down carbon. And I also don’t think about
trees as this individual tree. But what’s so cool about trees is that they are part of a network
always. Even if you see the single street tree, you know, that was looking kind of
scraggly on the side. It is part of a network. It is part of the urban community and the ecosystem
and environment that it’s in. And I think at Ecosia, it’s a real recognition of that. And that’s
what our founder realized when he started Ecosia, it was actually right after he had done traveling
through Brazil and some of the incredible ecosystems forced ecosystems there. And reading some
books as well about the importance of trees that kind of sparked this whole thing off.
It’s really, really amazing. And of course, you know, when we’re thinking about broad-scale
ecosystem restoration, regeneration, carbon drawdown, we’ve got Paul Hawkins book called drawdown
pointing to the solutions that we need to basically scale up as quickly as reasonably possible.
And what you guys are doing here by leveraging an everyday activity that many of us are
doing multiple times a day in the text space is really interesting. And can you just
describe for us what Ecosia is and does and what it looks like from a technology standpoint?
Sure. So Ecosia is a search engine just like any other search engine, right? You go to
www.Ecosia.org, you’ll see a little search box, no surprises. And like any other search engine,
the business model behind it is advertisement. So when you type search into a search box,
you’ll see usually search results, but you’ll also see some ad listing. So when you click on those
ads, the search engine makes money. And so what’s different about us is we will take 100% of the
profits that we make from that advertising business model. And we reinvest it into tree planting
and not only tree planting, but climate initiatives like regenerative agriculture,
renewable energy, or even supporting grassroots climate activism. So that is in a nutshell,
how Ecosia works. And when I say reinvest as well, I don’t mean we just write a check to an NGO
to plant some trees. We actually have a in-house team at Ecosia called the tree team literally.
And I think they have the coolest job because they will take this fund that we have,
this tree fund that we have, and they basically operate like an investment team. They will go out
and look for tree planting projects that plant at the standard we require. So for example,
we don’t do any planting that is in model cultures. We always plant diverse forests. We try to
prioritize for native species. If we plant a tree, we will monitor it for at least three years
and maintain it for at least three years to kind of get it to the point where it’s able to survive
on its own. And when we sign tree planting contracts with partners, we do it with a 20-year outlook
to really think about that long lifetime value of a tree, not just plopping the seed in the ground.
So our tree team is really busy doing this internally. And we also think about tree planting
for a portfolio perspective. So we have tree planting projects now in over 30 different countries.
And tree planting in Brazil looks really different both from how do you do it standpoint and what
is it for our standpoint, then maybe tree planting in the U.S. or Burkina Faso. So in Brazil, maybe we’re
doing tree planting to connect wildlife corridors and provide reformation, rehabilitation of habitats.
In Burkina Faso, maybe we’re doing tree planting to prevent desertification or to renew desert
five areas. In the U.S., we’re doing tree planting in urban context in order to combat some of
the historical injustices where black and brown communities traditionally live in areas with
lowest tree canopy cover because of discriminatory practices. And so that looks really different.
And we think about this basically. How do we tree plant across our entire portfolio? How do we allocate
funds to where they’re needed according to the season that they’re needed in order to make the
biggest holistic impact? Wow, that is really amazing and exciting. And, you know, I’m sitting here
wondering tree planting can be done in so many different ways right here outside of Boulder where
I’m currently located at Elk Run Farm. There’s a cluster of regenerative farm projects where thousands
of trees have been planted in drylands, agro ecology, strategy, right? And when we do these
plantings often, these are weekend gatherings where dozens of volunteers show up and we get
thousands in the ground in a couple of days. And so have a sense for the human side of this tree
planting activity. And also, you know, I had the opportunity to interview Tom Chi from At1 Ventures,
another technologist who’s focused on climate and social and environmental solutions.
And one of his projects, one of his companies is a robotic tree planting technology that can get
huge numbers of coded seeds into the ground in any given time frame, much greater numbers than
typically we see with the deployment of human capital. And I’m curious, do you guys, when you’re
looking at the portfolio, are you using those kinds of technology approaches to tree planting as
well or is it mostly the human type of planting like we’ve done around here at these farms?
It is a mix. So there are definitely some projects where we will use technologies, like drones,
for example, to help us do tree planting. In other places, it is more of a volunteer lead
effort where it’s a very human or manual effort. And this really depends on the type of project
we’re planting in. So what kind of area, what kind of, for example, if you just drop a seed and
really fertile, rich soil, and it will grow, but if you just drop a seed in a desert-fied area,
maybe not so much. So the planting method is going to differ based on the ecosystem.
And we really actually default to our partners. So at the end of the day, Ecosia finances the
tree planting, but we sign a contract with a partner, which is a local organization that has
expertise in the area that usually has proven methods for doing this work well and has experience
and can show that experience to us. And they’ll have staff, they’ll have capacities, so they’ll
basically say, look, we know that we can, in this area, do 10,000 trees. And this is how we would
plant it. And here’s the nursery. This is the whole setup. This is the amount of funding. We
would need to make that happen. And then Ecosia will help finance that work. And so a lot of it is
really done. Actually, all of it is done in really close partnership with the communities,
which can be NGO partners, could be government partners. It could be small community groups led
by a village chief somewhere. It takes all sorts of shapes and sizes. But we rely on that expertise
absolutely. So interesting. And to what extent do you guys collaborate directly with
organizations like the United Nations? I know this is the decade for ecosystem restoration,
and that there’s quite a bit of activity happening at that level of global organization. Is that
one of your collaborating partners in certain projects? We have 10,000 to collaborate with
kind of large multilateral organizations. And simply because I see them more as stakeholders
that bring lots of different people together to make pledges and commitments. And so something
like the UN, for example, might be really good at bringing different players to the table and saying,
hey, we need to plant trees. What are you guys going to do about it? What Ecosia does is we want to
make sure that if she’s are being planted, there’s not only the pledge, but there is a very,
very robust system for monitoring, evaluating, tracking. So every tree that we plant is basically
geotagged. It’s allowed in a database. We have what we are pretty sure, can’t verify for sure,
because we don’t release to this public. But we think we have the largest database of tree planting
in the world. And so because we do it in such a systematic way, it’s just a little bit of a
different value proposition from getting stakeholders to make a pledge. We want to make sure that this
is done in a very scientific, organized and thoughtful way.
Yeah, super interesting. Well, and I imagine with this large database and data set that you’re
working with, there’s potentially also the opportunity to work with the carbon credit value
of getting these trees planted. And I know some of our colleagues working in spaces like Biochar
and other environmental backed credits, the way that the carbon credit markets, voluntary
markets have evolved just in the last couple of years, has been extraordinary after decades of
anticipation. Is this one of the drivers you guys are looking at and leveraging? How does that
kind of play into your model? Oddly enough, no. And it’s counterintuitive, right? Because we have a
lot of trees that is a lot of carbon. But as a company, we made the conscious decision to not
participate in carbon markets at all. And this is where it’s really interesting because we aren’t
a traditional tree planting organization. We’re actually a search engine. And the way that we plant
trees is through the mechanism of users using our search engine. So we have this really unique
dynamic where our users, and absolutely they should be thinking this way, but our users think of
accuses trees as their trees. And if we start offering those trees up to carbon markets,
carbon credits, almost this idea of putting a price tag on our trees, I think it devalues
from the relationship that our users have with us as a company, the trees that they see as our own.
And what I think is really incredible about accuses community is they show up. If they see our tree
funds drop because we publish our financial data every month, they’ll really come in and both
here from them. What happens, you know, is everything okay. And if they see that we announce
new tree planting project, they’re happy when they see a tree planting project close to their home,
they get really excited. And we really want to honor that narrative.
Well, it’s super interesting. Well, in speaking of the Ecosia community of which I’m a member,
you guys have built quite an extensive community and network. How many users do you have at this point?
20 million monthly users. Wow. And so how do you guys, if you’re getting feedback and
getting that kind of input from the users, how do you manage? Imagine that could be a very high
volume of input at times. Well, I mean, this is why I would give a shout out to my entire marketing
team, who’s, you know, the ones reading the comments and sifting through. I think we have a good idea
of who our users are. And there are some general takeaways that we can pull from that. So Ecosia’s
audience tends to be really young, for example, a large portion of our users are under 25. And it
makes sense. The younger generation grew up with the climate crisis in their face, you know,
and seeing all of the worst impacts of it play out. And they have a lot of reason to be worried
about their future. And I think this shows up in the way that they will come to Ecosia and rally
around Ecosia because it’s free. It’s an easy thing to do. You can incorporate it into your lifestyle.
And we try to position ourselves in a way that leaves that channel of communication open
to our users by also being transparent with what we do. Unlike other maybe tech companies, what
we have that I think we really value is we have so much storytelling we can do. So we will always
send teams to take videos or photos and capture the tree planting that we’re doing. And part of that
again is an effort to honor the relationship we have with our users and to make sure we’re bringing
those stories back so that they can participate and see what’s happening.
Yeah, that’s so interesting. Well, speaking of it being free and relatively easy to do,
I’d like to have you just walk through the very simple steps for somebody to start using Ecosia.
Because I imagine some of our audience maybe aren’t yet using it and would like to make that
switch. So what needs to happen for folks to start planting trees through you guys?
There are three ways to do it. So number one, you can go to your desktop browser. So this is
anything like Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge and for some browsers, you’ll actually be able to go
into the settings where you can set your search engine and you can make it Ecosia.
This might not be possible for every browser, depending on what browser you’re using,
we’re definitely in Chrome, we’re definitely in Safari. But if you go to that menu and it’s not
in the settings, you can also install Ecosia as a web extension, a browser extension,
which is basically, for example, going to the Google Chrome store, searching Ecosia extension
and just add it. And then if you’re on your phone, you can download it as a browser app. So just
search Ecosia in the Android store or the Apple store and then you’ll be able to use it as an app.
Oh, that’s great. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I’ve got it on my phone and my computer. So that it is
easy to do. And I want to ask also, you know, with 20 million users, give us an idea of what that
translates to in terms of available dollars per year and what that means in terms of numbers
of trees getting planted each year. You know, I couldn’t give you the exact numbers off the top of my
head. And I believe the last time I looked, it was something like it’s between 10 to 20 million
that we put into our tree fund each year. And you can find those exact numbers on our website.
And then the number of trees as well is something that you would be able to find on our website
just by because we’ll do a breakdown of like how much money went into tree planting and then how
many trees does that mean? Yeah, I love that. And I was looking at the website just earlier before
we started recording. And I love that you guys have those running counters so that we can see how
trees are being planted more or less in real time. You’ve got listed over 162 million trees planted
900 plus species 70 plus active projects in 35 or more countries. And I’ll also noticed on
there a few of your guiding principles including this radical transparency. And I’m curious what
this means for you guys as a as a tech company, especially knowing that with search engines and other
online technology, a good part of where the value creation is coming from is tracking our
personal information, right? There’s all this whole kind of array of data harvesting that’s going
on whenever we’re online doing things like searching for a book or whatever it might be, right?
Yeah. Ecosia is a privacy-friendly search engine which means we don’t track your data. We don’t
use any third-party trackers. We don’t sell your data to advertisers. Any searches that you’ve
done in Ecosia are I think after two-week period permanently deleted. And the reason that we keep
it at all is actually just to manage spam and things like that and making sure nothing is hitting
our servers. And part of the reason we do that is because yes, we are a tree planting search
engine, but bigger than that, we believe in being a purpose-driven social impact company. And we
believe in something called stacles or capitalism, which means when we’re making decisions, we’re
thinking about them from the framework of who does this serve and who do we want this to serve.
So yes, we can be a search engine and plant trees and also collect your data, but those values
fundamentally for us are at odds with each other because if we are trying to be a company that
serves people on planet, we can’t do that well by planting trees, but then turning around and
collecting your personal data, using it in ways that you didn’t consent to, and kind of contributing
to a world of digital surveillance that is increasingly unfortunately becoming case-normal.
And so it really boils down to company values, the way we make decisions, the way we think about
how to make those decisions. Yeah, it’s really, really compelling. I mean, I think that
as we’re kind of heading toward web 3.0, which I’m not going to pretend that I really understand
completely, it seems like there’s more emerging around community self-organizing and self-selecting
for greater privacy protection, greater values driven impacts and activities among these
different stakeholder ecosystems. And I’m curious, like you being a social tech impact entrepreneur
and technologist, you’ve done several different projects and businesses prior to Acosia.
Tell us a bit about your other projects in the past and also where you sort of see things going
over the next several years as we see more and more development hopefully trending and some
really positive directions in all of this. Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting, right? So I
in school, I studied environmental studies and business and that’s kind of, I always had this
interest around climate and the outdoors because I am just an outdoors enthusiast said,
would be really happy to just drop me in the mountains for a couple of days and I resurface,
you know, a week later. But that being said, as fate would have it, I kind of ended up first in
the education sector and ended up building an ed tech company and and selling that ed tech company
and then going and working for another education tech company. So later on the one I worked for
had actually built a computer operating system with a lot of pre-installed content for offline
emerging markets. And after that company is when I came and joined Acosia. And so it’s weird because
I’ve gotten to sit at this intersection of education and tech. I sat at the intersection of
climate and tech. I sat at the intersection of privacy and tech and digital rights.
What you would think happens is you kind of get bogged down to like, oh man, which of these
issues are most important. All of these feel like big overwhelming crises, right? We’ve got to
tackle education. But man, we’ve also got to do something about the climate crisis. But man,
we’ve also got to care about privacy and it all becomes little much. And you ask me where I see
things going. What was interesting is once I got to be in and experience all of those spaces,
you kind of get this bird-eye view where you start realizing that each of these seemingly separate,
seemingly disparate social problems all come down to larger root causes a lot of times. A lot of
times that have to do with this myth around endless growth about companies not being able to answer
the question of what is enough. You know, a company is actually a really weird entity if you
think about it. Someone sets this up and it’s this basically immortal entity being that has a
destiny to grow forevermore uncapped, which is unless you go bust, right? It’s basically like either
we fail or we will just forever live on and get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And social impact companies, I think it forces you to reckon with that question of what is
enough and what are we actually trying to achieve here? So being in this space and seeing all of these
issues play out, I actually started, you know, thinking less about like, oh man, is it climate
that I spend my time on or like maybe actually I’m an education activist or maybe I’m a pro.
No, I think I really started thinking about like, how do you actually innovate on business models?
How do you actually have businesses try to do different practices? I’m not talking about
social focuses. I’m talking about Ecosia, for example, making the conscious decision that they’re
going to reinvest 100% of its profits, which is something that I really haven’t seen another
company do. Almost as like a huh, well, I wonder if I do this strange thing with my company, will
that make the world a better place? Maybe the answer is yes, maybe the answer is no, but someone’s
got to try it. And changing this myth of endless growth and unsustainable capitalism that is
often at the root of all the intersection of these problems. And that’s where ICS going is having
to reckon with some of these economic questions and business questions that underlie almost every
social issue in any context. Yeah, that’s so brilliant. I really appreciate your perspective and
insight on all of this. And also it makes me think about, you know, a few of the themes that I
wrote about in both my five-year-old book called YonEarth, the nonfiction piece, and then more
recently, my new novel called Veridi Toss, where these themes are explored. And in both of those
books, I geek out a little bit on the etymology of Ecosia, which of course is part of the name
Ecosia. And this comes to us from the ancient Greek Ecos, or Ecos. I don’t know if I’m saying
it correctly, but this term Ecos means home and also means implicitly community. And it’s where
we get both our term ecology and economy. You just mentioned the economics and the reckoning that
is underway. And it seems to me that the social enterprise leaders like Ecosia are not only
having specific impact in the ways you’re having impact. You’re also very much
trailblazing, very much leading the way, very much presenting the new templates, right? Sort of echoing
the well-known Buckminster Fuller quote, you know, don’t try to combat a system that’s not working,
just build a better system and transition to it, basically, to paraphrase. And so I’m just,
I’m absolutely thrilled that you guys not only are doing what you’re doing in terms of the tech,
the privacy rights, the community aspect on the human side, but that you are also funneling all
essentially the value creation into these very real environmental and social positive impacts
all around the planet. That’s tremendous, right? And like, what do you think is different about
you guys, your leadership, perhaps some things you’re willing to give up, right? I imagine
you might not be sending rockets into space any time real soon, right? Like, explain to us a little
bit of what that decision-making process looks like in terms of some of the quote unquote benefits
you might be choosing to forego on the one hand and perhaps some of the other very real benefits
that you’re able to access and experience that maybe mainstream entrepreneurs and capitalists
don’t access as readily. I’m glad you asked this because I think there is often a fallacy or
trap or thinking about social impact organizations as these golden standard companies who have it
figured out, especially for profit impact companies where it’s like, man, you guys are making money
and you’re doing good. It’s the dream. But the reality is there’s a lot of gray area where exactly
as you said, anyone who’s doing a social enterprise right now is trailblazing your pioneering because
it’s not the traditional way to do business and if you’re pioneering and trailblazing de facto,
there’s a lot of stuff that you’re going to have to just test and make up and wing as you go because
nobody else has done it and you don’t know what happened. So I, one of the clearest examples for
me that has now emerged is you have someone like Patagonia who has created 1% for the planet,
very well known and you have a lot of companies now doing 1% for the planet and you actually have
a cozy on the other extreme who is saying 100% for the planet and both of those were trailblazing
actions, right? And before Patagonia, nobody had come and said systematically let’s do 1% before
a cozy no one came and said let’s do 100% who’s going to be the company that says let’s do 75% or
let’s do 26% because we’ve looked at both case studies and we actually think we’re going to try
something even different because as you said, there’s there’s trade-offs to these decisions that
you make. So when a cozy puts 100% of profits in impact, that means we have less money for growth,
we have less money for marketing, we have less money for hiring than another tech search engine
with maybe hundreds of engineers, we don’t have hundreds of engineers where a company of around
a hundred people. And when we think about growth, for example, right? Everyone’s got this idea
of I’m a founder, I want to go in Shark Tank, I’m going to pitch be brilliant, I’m going to get
billions of VC funding and it’s going to be a dream. A cozy was bootstrapped over a decade.
So we’re steward on company, this means our CEO gave away rights to ever sell or take profits out
of Acosia, he says he’s happy to just have a robot he doesn’t want to get and aside from the personal implications for him, it also has implications for our growth.
It means we’re not actually able to grow in the same way as our competitors, because
if our competitor has $3 million of VC backed money, they can throw out a marketing campaign.
We actually have to rely on our revenue for that and our revenue, a large portion of
it, goes to our impact.
And so this is not to say it’s good or it’s bad or it’s basically saying this is a very,
very different way to do business.
And there’s going to be challenges because it’s a different way to do business.
But somebody’s got to do it so they can try it.
So that somebody else knows when they’re sitting with this, like, man, what do I want
to do with my profit?
Ah, okay, I know what 1% looks like.
I know what 100% looks like.
What is the mission and the impact I am personally trying to achieve?
And then what decision is going to best serve that?
Think goodness, I have some data to make that decision off of.
And I think I’m a real advocate for more people going and creating more data points so
that other people have more data points to make their decisions off of.
Yeah, it’s really, it’s so compelling and exciting.
And of course, you and I have had a couple of offline discussions around some of the innovative
work we’re doing in the Y-Earth community ecosystem right now around regenerative finance
and social enterprise.
And we’re kicking up some potential collaborations.
And we recently also interviewed Kate Williams, the CEO of 1% for the planet and are similarly
exploring some opportunities there.
And I am really interested in how we as a global community right now in this very precarious
and potentially exquisitely transformative moment in our species evolution and development.
I am very curious how we most effectively deploy massive sums of capital in socially and
environmentally appropriately structured stewardship entities and ecosystems such that we’re
able to really scale all of these positive impacts in a way that brings greater volumes
of capital in and ensures that the profits, the proceeds, the value creation is
truly being distributed in a stakeholder capitalism ecosystem stewardship capitalism
ecosystem.
Instead of simple shareholder capitalism ecosystem, I’m wondering if who knows it might be the
rule of 72 maybe there’s a 72% mark I you know Eric Lombardi was on a recent episode
as well talking about the social enterprise movement which has a specific stipulation
of a minimum of 51% of distributable profits going to impact NGOs.
And so I don’t know I’ve been playing with models that look at a starting point of 51
and then ratcheting up toward you know maybe it’s 72 or 80 or whatever as the profitability
scales as those financiers the sources of capital recoup investments and realize some
modest or appreciable return but you know this is about making living and not making
killings I think overall in this whole kind of framework so yeah I’m obviously getting
a little excited about all of this and kind of geek out on this but I’m I’m very excited
about where this innovation might be taking us in the next few years and what doors might
be opening up for the global community around this.
And you know what I think one of the things I’ve taken away working across social sectors
is that there probably isn’t going to be hard bass rules instead there’s probably going
to be evolving rules and I think those rules will also change by sector so even though
I see fundamental root problems linking sectors I also know that for instance the education
sector that I once worked in a lot of times nonprofit models are better suited to education
models than for profit models because you have a very very long return horizon a lot of
times the people who need good education the most are the ones who are least able to
pay for it and man you’re just you’re not going to squeeze someone for good education right
you’re not going to squeeze them for every penny you can get but this person is going to go
to the education system for maybe a decade before they really get tangible results and even then
it’s it’s also not quantifiable and then you compare that to something like the FinTech industry
which also has tremendous social impact right if you can just make borrowing and lending accessible
to populations who didn’t have access to that sort of credit and finance before but FinTech
tends to have a much faster return horizon than education does and so there you know maybe then
it’s a rule of 75 but maybe in education it’s like oh man we just got to be nonprofits here
and then actually like bring nonprofits also into this space as an equally viable option that’s
not seen as something that’s bureaucratic or you know something that was phased out with dinosaurs
but it’s like man no you know charity can also be really sharp organizations and again just all
I think it really just depends on the question of what impact are you trying to make what sector
what is the economics behind that and then how do you make decisions and structure your business
decisions in a way and what I’m really excited would love to see happen is to start seeing this trickle
down into business schools and education right so when I was getting my business degree I kind of
walked away with this idea that oh when I create a company it’s it’s going to be a sole proprietorship
it’s going to be a partnership it’s going to be a limited company maybe if you’re really wild it’ll
be a benefit core and I didn’t know there was stewardship owned models I didn’t know you could
have a co-op setup for ownership yeah I didn’t realize that these were choices at the table
and I think where it’s going to really get interesting is when more and more people start realizing
oh you know it’s not just abnc it’s maybe a through z or like maybe I can make up my own option
because I’ve seen so much innovation now and so much diversity in the way that people think about
what business is yeah yeah that’s yeah it’s so interesting and my my wheels are turning right now
thinking about a recent conversation I had with actually with John Perkins who’s been on the podcast
wrote confessions of an economic hitman and co-founded potter mama alliance and wrote more recently
touching the jaguar discussing some of his experiences with different indigenous communities
and wisdom keepers and he speaks very clearly about the differentiation between death economy
and life economy and while this might be a bit extreme a bit black and white I think it helps us
frame our directionality in our decision making at all levels and in context very diverse contexts
and so yeah it’s interesting to think about for example certain models stewarding more of what
we might think of as the commons right and education I think is a good example of this and here
in the United States obviously we’ve seen some really terrible outcomes with four profit education
models which you know we’re really celebrated by certain folks over the last few decades but I
think it’s pretty clear the evidence the data is showing that that might not actually be the best
approach overall and and you know when we think about things like food systems and other
aspects of health wellness stewardship regeneration sustainability on earth and in our societies
it’s very clear that maybe not everything should be for profit and this is part of the opportunity
we get to consider and reckon with as we’re thinking about the most intelligent sort of
deployment of diverse business models going forward.
One of the things that I’ve been very lucky to be able to do is work in social impact and for
for profit tech companies specifically across cultures so I spent four years working in Kenya’s
startup sector that included some time working for San Francisco headquartered companies I’ve
traveled back and forth and now I’ve been in Berlin with Ecosio for three years and obviously I’m
American myself so that was kind of the cultural context of business that I grew up with
and what I found fascinating is how different these calculations are in different cultural values
and context so for example I think Kenya and more broadly African culture has an amazing
grasp on community and it has it’s a less individualist culture than America is and I think
there’s a real sense unfortunately it’s almost being corrupted a little bit now by how much
a space like Kenya for example is really overrun by American investors and American capitalism
has kind of seeped into but before there’s this real sense of community and how do we build together
in Germany for example then you think about the kind of allocation of capital really
differently and if you think about the history of Germany and where they came from from world
work too people here Berlin is still a very cash-based economy not a lot of people will play with
things like credit or the stock market or leverage or debt and they will prefer my experience has
been they will prefer steadier growth but safer growth that is more about building with the assets
that you have rather than you know getting this huge leverage which is how we tend to think
about growth in the United States and I think there’s lessons to be learned from all of those
pieces right so when Ecosios thinking about what’s the optimal allocation maybe an American would
come in and say man you guys could afford to take way more risk right like take some credit take
some debt do some leverage and maybe Americans could learn from the German approach of you know well
maybe we actually be a little bit more conservative and make sure we’ve got some cash reserve in
the bank for a rainy day because maybe that’ll slow down our growth but maybe it’ll make it more
sustainable and and this view on individualism like we could all learn a little bit from I think like
Kenyan and African culture of like well maybe actually it doesn’t need to be so big why are we
always thinking about making things as big as possible why isn’t it as glorified to have a lot of
really strong community pockets as it is to have this big scalable thing right I hear about scale
all the time whenever I talk to businesses investors it’s always like how do we scale how do we
scale and do we actually ever step back and ask ourselves the question of like should I be
scaling why am I scaling and maybe you really do need to scale in Ecosis case the more we scale the
more trees we can plant but I don’t think it’s always the answer that scale is what you’re after
and and getting to see impact plan in different cultural contexts I think it just gives you
pause to be able to question things that you didn’t even realize were assumptions you were making
yeah well so interesting speaking of scaling as Ecosia continues to grow and I’m assuming
there has to be a growth curve of some sort because you at one point had zero users and now you have
20 million you know if you guys were able to go to that say 200 million mark just to look at
like a 10x scenario does that mean there’s a linear correlation of 10x as many trees being planted
worldwide or is there some sort of geometric growth in the impact that you would have in that kind
of scenario it’s not linear growth and the relationship between users and trees would be more
complex than I could model out so it would require somebody else but basically what happens
is it not only depends on the number of users we have but it also depends on how they use a
search engine so how they engage with ads for example if they click on ads it depends on what
partners we’re working with so tree planting in urban context for example an urban tree can cost
hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars of tree because you’ve got to do community engagement
you’ve got a jackhammer up concrete it’s you know urban environments aren’t made for trees
whereas if you’re doing large-scale reformation in a really fertile area tree cost drops a lot
so it’s going to depend on a mix of basically how users are engaging what tree planting partners
were working with what the cost are per tree and again more complex than I could possibly model
out so I know it’s not linear what it is I couldn’t possibly tell you yeah yeah no that’s that’s
fair yeah and by the way about urban environments not being made or designed for trees yet I would
hopefully add to that because I think one of the big opportunities we have for mental health
for creativity for human well-being in addition to all of the other environmental performance
attributes is essentially greening the cities as much as we possibly can world-wide and from
erud to very moist climates I think we’ve got huge opportunities there in real needs and it’s
super cool that you guys have already chosen to again trailblaze in the urban arena I’m curious
like here in the US where might we be able to go and visit and see observe experience some of
the projects that you guys are supporting we are taking our first baby steps in urban tree planting
at a cozy yet so we’ve got a lot of expertise and experience when it comes to large-scale
reformation and I didn’t realize this until I started spearheading this work I think many people
don’t but urban tree planting is a entirely different discipline of work than large-scale
reformation and because man all the boundaries you hit up on in urban context it’s like you
plant a tree people aren’t happy about it you mean they don’t want a big tree that sheds on
their yard there’s now you know municipal municipality guidelines about how wide a tree can be where
it can be what’s the permitting process does it hit a water pipe and and I was walking around
Los Angeles one day with an urban forest and it’s incredible he would just point at a tree and be
like you know that one shouldn’t have been planted there because its root system is really wide
and it’s going to kink up the sidewalk within a span of five years but you know this one is a
really good fit because this one will survive even if it’s not planted often it doesn’t get too big
people don’t complain no all these things that if you just plant a tree in a forest you don’t have
to think about this right so um all of that is to say we traditionally hadn’t done urban tree
planted we didn’t know any of this um but we decided to because you know looking at a place like
the states where a lot of our users were and and people really asking for impact that was closer to
home and this was also right after the 2020 George Floyd protests and and really just having some of
these social economic disparities stare at you in the face it was like okay our philosophy has
always been right tree right place in a context like the US what does right tree right place mean
and it turns out that if you look at a map of canopy cover in the US historically discriminated
areas like historically redlined areas that were previously disqualified for funding because of
the demographic makeup of the communities that lived there are a direct map of where you now
see lowest canopy cover and lowest canopy cover means worse consequences of extreme heat it means
no flooding control it means the worst air pollution and of course these are
often black and brown communities and so we said okay so right tree right place in the US means
going into these communities specifically but we can’t just also go in we are a German company
that we sometimes we don’t have a claim on trying to make an impact on these areas right which
have good reason to be very suspicious of people coming in and just doing good and and so again it
was a very humbling learning process of talking to a lot of organizations trying to find the right
partner who does work closely with the communities who has built trust and who could kind of guide
us and be like well when you do urban tree planting a lot of people want to fund the tree planting
nobody wants to fund the community engagement no one wants to pay to print brochures and
English and Spanish so that people can understand what’s happening nobody wants to like do the hard
work of tabling and sitting in the sun so that you know people have a place to go and ask questions
and so that’s what we we started trying to finance is blended programs that do urban tree planting
but really focus on community engagement and we’ve launched a project now in Los Angeles with
an amazing partner city plants we’ve launched one in Chicago with a partner open lands and and
we’re getting ready so now it’s two two new projects in New York that I’m really excited about
but I yeah I really want to emphasize that this was new to Acosia and the credit really
goes to our partners for kind of holding our hand through this process that’s awesome that is
really cool to hear about I’m I can think of a really interesting organization in the Denver market
that might be a good partner at some point too that I’d love to connect you guys with if there’s
interest you know at the appropriate time and yeah let me let me remind our audience Ruby that this
is the YonEarth community podcast I am your host Aaron William Perry and today we’re talking
with Ruby out the head of North America at Acosia and want to take a quick moment to let you know
that you can go to acosia.org ecosia.org and we’ll have all these links in the show notes to learn
more about the Chicago and LA projects specifically there are specific links that will include
for some of Ecosia’s blog posts around those projects and you can also connect with Ruby on linked
in if you would like to it’s ruby dash out AU of course want to give a shout out and thank
some of our sponsors and partners who make this podcast series possible this includes Puriam the
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and yeah Ruby we’re gonna after our podcast discussion we’re gonna have a few minutes of our
behind the scenes chatting getting a maybe a little deeper into some of the business model opportunities
that we’re exploring together and and maybe a little more on the personal side too just to chat
you know in the nice casual way there but for folks who are interested in experiencing our behind
the scenes recordings with our guests as well you can become an ambassador at YonEarth.org
so that you get the password to access all those additional resources and yeah so you know on
that note Ruby I do I do want to ask you so when you’re not uh leading the charge at Acosia
what what are you doing in your in your free time hobbies you know nature you did mention getting
out in the mountains something that definitely resonates for me give us a bit of an idea of like
what what Ruby’s up to when she’s not hard at work at Acosia. I mean in an ideal role as I
said if you just drop me in the mountains with a sleeping bag and a tent I’m a happy girl
and it’s not always possible in Berlin so you’ll actually find me doing a lot of salsa dancing
we’re hosting some board game nights I am on settlers of Catan fanatic but oh yeah
hey well for the listeners out there who are true fanatics you’ll probably be less
than impressive my skills and but I’m I’m also a big reader so uh somewhere in between there is
great you’ll find me on an urban city night. I love it yeah my kids crush me in settles there’s
a katana I have a mixed feeling about that game but four games are fun. I’ve been there. Yeah
I haven’t I haven’t figured it out yet my son’s got that one really figured out that’s so cool
yeah and you know I’m I’m really curious about this connection with nature and and maybe this
will be my final question for you in the podcast here today. I’m convinced myself that for many
of us this connection with nature is essential to our inspiration and also our intelligence gathering
that there’s a certain form of intelligence we get to experience in nature that we don’t get
to experience in pixels and computers and binary and so on and and I’m really I’m interested
to share from you you know if you agree with that statement generally and just kind of for you
personally what what is that what is that like like is that a really important thing for you.
Yes I could not agree more and I I mean I got into this whole thing because I was very lucky in my
university program there was a scientific diving program that allowed me to put my scientific
scuba diver and allowed me to do some scuba diving and research in marine protected areas
and then I would later on and go and scuba dive in non-protected areas and you
man you saw the difference if you you really saw the difference of what nature perhaps once was
and this is just a shadow of that and places where we didn’t respect that and but one of the
things I loved about being in the ocean and this is true of the mountains through anytime in nature
as I feel like I have space and it’s something that I think is one of the most overlooked
intelligences as you call it but most days I will make 20 to 30 minutes I’ve got a big kind of
forest courtyard behind my flat very lucky but I’ll just make time to be there for 20 to 30 minutes
doing doing nothing except for being there and I don’t know how to put it into words but that
space is really important for me to function to to actually step back and look at my life a
little bit objectively and look at my opinions and the narrative I get sucked into every day about
you know what I think about this and this is my opinion on this and to actually step back and
be like okay so that’s that’s a opinion it’s for those who meditate I think it’s very similar
to meditation and nature almost kicks you into that and I I really value that just in terms
of being able to function as a human yeah absolutely and that really resonates is I’m the same
way and you know increasingly I recognize in my own personal job description that time in nature
is not a you know nice thing if you can have it it’s not like a thing that you maybe do once in
a while for me it’s like this thing that absolutely must happen in a meaningful way on a daily basis
as well as a weekly kind of immersive you know day in the woods or whatever and yeah I just I
find that I feel way better my my balance is way better internally and and my clarity of thought
is much different and I know there’s a lot of emerging science around this that helps us kind
of understand what’s going on but yeah it’s it’s it’s very real and hence another reason why
bringing a lot more force canopy into the urban environments is so important right?
Yeah and I think it’s one of the hardest conversations you can have because you can quantify
what’s the economic value of preventing storm damage or like you know health benefits of
decreasing air pollution but how do you qualify or quantify something like just giving people
space and these are often the people who need space the most and I just having a moment in time
for you’re not getting any input you’re not there’s nothing in your earbuds there’s nothing
you’re reading there’s nothing you’re consuming I think it actually allows for independence of thought
as well because you cannot have independence of thought without space to actually look at your
thoughts and look at your beliefs and and man the the communities who don’t have to recover really
are often the communities who deserve that the most absolutely absolutely well ruby thank you
so much for your time for all the work you and your colleagues are doing helping create more space
for people around the world along with all of the other social and environmental impacts that
you’re having and you know before we sign off I just I want to open the floor to you there’s
anything else you’d like to say or or mention before we conclude the episode the floor is yours
nothing except for a big thank you I mean to you your entire team for the work that you all do
we can’t get our message out there without a community and and really I just enjoy
having the chance to sit down with someone and as you say kind of geek out over the stuff
because it really doesn’t create any value until it leaves our heads and I always also just like
to thank the Ecosia community because again nothing we do would be possible without 20 million
people who will log on and and use us in plant trees so thank you to to you your team all of our
users out there absolutely thanks so much ruby take care thank you so much the YonEarth
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