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Nan Ransohoff says tech lay-offs will be no barrier to net-zero

Recession or not, companies like Google and Meta will drive the global delivery of carbon-removal services, says Stripe’s head of climate, Nan Ransohoff.

Nan Ransohoff, head of Frontier, an advanced market commitment led by big tech to create a market for carbon removal. Picture: Jonathan Cami
Nan Ransohoff, head of Frontier, an advanced market commitment led by big tech to create a market for carbon removal. Picture: Jonathan Cami

Silicon Valley veteran Nan Ransohoff bounced around Uber, Nest and software provider Opower before she found her perfect role, one she hopes will shape the future of global carbon removal technologies.

The executive, now head of climate at payments giant Stripe, says it all came down to the “2am test”.

“The big question I asked myself is, ‘Will I be excited to work on whatever it is until two o’clock in the morning?’,” Ransohoff says. “For me, that’s climate.


Meet the innovators who are leading the transition towards a greener economy in the new edition of The List: Green Power Players, available online and in print on Friday, February 24.


“And with something like climate impact, there are lots of things you can optimise for in a role. It’s sort of, ‘How much are you learning as an individual? What’s the impact of what you’re doing? How much fun is it? And how well does it suit your own skills?’.

“I would say that over my career the knobs, like the volume on each of those knobs, it goes up and down as I try to chip away at different parts of this huge giant problem that is climate.”

Ransohoff is speaking on the sidelines of the Sunrise, a summit organised by Blackbird, one of Australia’s largest venture capital firms. She says that so-called “Big Tech” – software giants such as Meta, Google and Stripe – will play a critical role in the seismic task of achieving global net-zero emissions by 2050.

Slashing carbon emissions to that degree will require heavy lifting from all sectors of the economy and, according to Ransohoff, there are two ways for populations to get there: either stop emitting, or to take the carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere and the ocean and store it somewhere.

“The world has to do a ton of both,” she says. “We’re particularly focused on the latter, because we didn’t realise that we were going to need to do so much of it until very recently. Part of the problem with carbon removal has been the lack of customers, and part of

the reason there’s been a lack of customers is that there’s no intrinsic value.

“Humans derive value from energy but we don’t derive value from storing carbon in the ground, so as a result, carbon-removal technologies have been virtually non-existent, or very expensive.”

The List: Green Power Players is out Friday, February 24.
The List: Green Power Players is out Friday, February 24.

Stripe, with Ransohoff leading the charge, is tackling this thorny problem head on.

In a joint effort, dubbed Frontier, the company has teamed with Google parent company Alphabet, Facebook parent company Meta, McKinsey and Shopify in a bid to both increase the availability of carbon-removal services, and lower their cost.

To get there, Stripe and the other member companies pledged at least $US50 million ($74.5 million) across a decade, including pre-purchases of carbon removals. They’re helping advance promising new technologies by giving them guaranteed financial backing. Ransohoff says the project can be traced back to some initial boardroom meetings three years ago, after which Stripe executives pledged $1 million towards permanent carbon removal.

“When we did that and made those first purchases, two things happened,” she says.

“The first is that the carbon-removal community had almost a weirdly positive reaction to this. The field had been so starved for capital that it was surprising to me that anybody would care about a million dollars in the first place … And the second thing that happened was that we got a bunch of outreach from Stripe customers basically saying ‘Hey, we’ve wanted to do something in climate for a while, but it’s hard to figure out what to do, so if we send you some money, can you do it?’.”

Carbon-removal technologies tend to be expensive at the start, but costs come down over time as they scale, Ransohoff says. Frontier has so far backed a wide range of early stage solutions, including Australian start-up AspiraDAC – which uses solar-powered technology to store carbon dioxide – and RepAir, an Israeli company that has created an electrochemical device that uses electricity to separate carbon dioxide from the air.

The fund’s early achievements are impressive. Some 30,000 businesses across 40 countries have collectively raised nearly $US1 billion – about 1000 times Stripe’s initial commitment – through the Frontier initiative.

“On the one hand that’s great, and on the other hand, there’s still such a long way to go,” Ransohoff says.

The private sector is only one piece of the puzzle. The executive uses a baseball analogy to make her point: the private sector can help climate technologies get to first base, she says, but governments will then need to step in to help them deliver a home run.

“In the US, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) just passed, and that’s hundreds of billions of dollars towards climate solutions. My hope is that this plays a catalytic role,” she says.

“I think there’s some really exciting opportunities for public-private partnership that we haven’t yet explored.

The recent economic downturn hit companies across the tech sector, slashing valuations by double digits in many cases including Stripe, which in November was forced to slash about 14 per cent of its workforce. Frontier’s four tech companies – Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and Stripe – collectively lost more than a trillion dollars in value in 2022.

“We are facing stubborn inflation, energy shocks, higher interest rates, reduced investment budgets, and sparser start-up funding,” Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison wrote in an email to staff, adding that Stripe “is fundamentally well-positioned to weather harsh circumstances”.

While many companies were forced to lay off staff and be more fiscally conservative than they were previously, Ransohoff insists that Stripe has no plans whatsoever to re-evaluate its commitments on climate. The company, she says, is in it for the long haul.

“Stripe’s whole thing is building out the economic infrastructure for the internet, and we tend to take a long view on things. Infrastructure tends to take a long time to build and so the company’s founders are very progress-orientated and committed to the kind of long-term projects that are going to help the world move in the right direction,” she says.

“[Stripe’s founders] have been really supportive. Which is, you know, in my experience not that common. And I think that yes, it is certainly possible that the recession will have impacts on the climate space in the next couple of years.

“But most recessions are 18 to 24 months, and the climate game is decades long.”

Ransohoff is ultimately remaining optimistic amid the downturn, preferring to zoom out and focus on the progress achieved in the past few years alone. The climate sector is now one awash with talent, capital and attention from all corners.

“We are in a very different place, I think, to where we were 10 years ago,” she says. “Ten years ago people thought that in order to work in climate you had to be a scientist, you had to be a policymaker, or you had to be an engineer. And now, companies are going to need general counsels, they’re going to need HR teams, they’re going to need analysts and accountants.

“In climate, the tent really is big enough for everybody now.”

Read related topics:Climate Change

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/renewable-energy-economy/nan-ransohoff-says-tech-layoffs-will-be-no-barrier-to-netzero/news-story/ed1cd60db154708941d63194a7580a38