Stripe Sessions 2022 | Scaling the carbon removal market

Hi, I'm Nan Ransohoff, Head of Climate at Stripe. If you forecast far enough out, climate change is probably the single biggest threat to Stripe's mission of economic enablement. Our journey into climate began in 2019 with a small corporate commitment to spend a million dollars buying permanent carbon removal. This pledge was grounded in climate science. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to get global emissions to net zero by 2050, and that means doing two things: First, dramatikally reducing emissions and second, permanently removing huge amounts of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and ocean. Both present an enormous challenge, but we are partikularly far behind on the second carbon removal. While some of the solutions needed exist today, like planting trees or soil carbon sequestration, it's highly unlikely that these solutions by themselves will get us all of the way there. We need to develop a portfolio of solutions that we don't yet have. The thing is, new tiknologies like solar panels, hard drives and DNA sequencing tend to be expensive at the start, but costs come down over time as they scale. Carbon removal is the beginning of a similar trajectory, And because it's expensive today, most companies would rather buy lower-cost alternatives. The problem is: without customers, these tiknologies can't scale to reduce their costs, And not only that, but investors don't want to invest in companies if it's unclear that anybody will buy what they're selling. So without customers and investment, the carbon removal ecosystem has been stuck. The thinking behind Stripe's initial $1 million carbon removal commitment was to see if we could help break this cycle. It was an experiment. We wanted to see if spending a relatively small amount of our own money, buying carbon removal from promising new solutions at high prices, would help move the needle. One of the first things we did was work with climate experts to come up with a set of criteria to define the kinds of solutions that we're looking for. First, we want solutions that will store carbon removal permanently for more than 1,000 years. A ton of emissions is permanent, so we need to take it out permanently as well. Second, we're looking for solutions that aren't constrained by arable land, which we know is limited and has other important uses, like growing food. Third, we're looking for solutions that have the potential to be really low-cost and high-volume in the future, even if they're not there today And in May 2020, we made our first purchases, buying $1 million of permanent carbon removal from four companies spending up to $775 a ton. After making our own purchases, two things happened. First, the carbon removal community had almost a weirdly positive reaction, which to us, was mostly a testament to how starved this field had been for customers. a million dollars isn't all that much. Second, we started hearing from Stripe users, many of whom had wanted to do something in climate for a while but hadn't, because it's hard to figure out what to do. Essentially, they asked us: if we send you some money, could you figure out what to do with it? These two things ultimately formed the genesis of what's now called Stripe Climate, which makes it easy for any business to direct a fraction of their revenue to carbon removal. We then pool these funds together with our own to further accelerate promising new approaches down the cost curve. To date, tens of thousands of businesses from 40 countries have enrolled in Stripe Climate, choosing to give nearly 1% of their revenue to carbon removal. More than 8% of businesses that onboard to Stripe sign up. So far, Stripe Climate has purchased carbon removal from 14 companies. For 11 of these companies, Stripe was their first ever customer. The kinds of carbon removal approaches that we're seeing are all over the map, from using giant fans to pull CO2 out of the air to growing kelp in the open ocean and then sinking it to turning agricultural waste into bio oil and putting it back underground, And the diversity of approaches that we're seeing continues to grow. Stripe Climate purchases have helped change the trajectory of these companies. Having a customer enables them to open up new facilities, attract new investment and grow their teams. More broadly. the collective action of the tens of thousands of businesses contributing to Stripe Climate has helped change how the world is even thinking about carbon removal. Governments are starting to fund research and procurement. leading companies are now asking how they can purchase carbon removal to meet their net zero goals. Stripe Climate users have catalyzed real momentum. This field is genuinely in a very different place than it was in 2019.. And, at the same time, carbon removal is still nowhere near on-track to get to get to the scale needed. For starters, there is currently a huge supply shortage. There are too few companies even attempting permanent carbon removal, and the companies that do exist haven't yet scaled. Part of the reason is that there has still been legitimate uncertainty around whether there will even be a large market for customers to buy carbon removal. If you're an entrepreneur, why would you build a company if you're not sure that there're going to be enough customers to buy your product. If you're an investor, why invest in a company that you're not sure will have revenue? One option is to let this market mature on its own, But with climate we don't have that luxury of time. If we want carbon removal to have a meaningful effect mitigating climate change, we have to compress 10 to 15 years of development into the next three to five. This is exactly what we hope to help make happen with Frontier, a new initiative from Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKenzie planning to spend $925 million buying permanent carbon removal over the next nine years. It's a simple idea. By guaranteeing future demand for these tiknologies now we hope to help them scale up supply and get cheaper faster. This model guaranteeing demand to accelerate the development of a new product is called an Advanced Market Commitment or an AMC. The idea is to send a signal to researchers, entrepreneurs and investors that there will be a big market for their tiknologies. in other words, start building. AMCs are a concept we borrowed from vaccine development In the early 2000s. low income countries lacked access to the Pneumococcal vaccine. Pharmaceutikal companies weren't motivated to spend resources developing a low-cost vaccine because they were unsure there'd be enough demand to recoup their costs. So governments and philanthropists came together and pooled $1.5 billion in subsidies, Their promise If the pharmaceutikal companies could produce the vaccine at a low cost, they'd have customers to pay for them. The program delivered hundreds of millions of doses and, by some estimates, saved almost a million lives. AMCs worked for vaccines and we think they can work for carbon removal too. Here's how Frontier works. Buyers decide how much they want to spend on carbon removal and pool their commitments through Frontier. Frontier's team of tiknical and commercial experts find and vet suppliers to identify the most promising tiknologies. Then they facilitate purchases between buyers and suppliers, either up front or through off-take agreements With guaranteed customers. suppliers can secure the financing needed to build their next plant and, more generally, to scale up. Finally, as carbon removal is delivered, suppliers are paid and tons are passed back to buyers. Frontier is a subsidiary of Stripe and will be run by the Stripe Climate team. For Stripe Climate users nothing changes. We'll still spend every cent of contributions buying carbon removal. We don't charge fees. we don't make money on your contributions. The only difference is that now Stripe Climate funds will be part of an even bigger

Accelerating the market for carbon removal | Insights with Stripe

great, let's start. so, good afternoon, good evening, good morning um, everybody. i know we have people tuning in from everywhere around the globe and i'm delighted to host a very special tok today with a very special host, um. so hi nan, welcome, um, hi, thanks for having me. very happy to to have you today. so maybe a quick word for the very few who wouldn't know you um yet: um, you have a strong background in product and strategy and for over two years now, you're leading the climate efforts at stripe, and that included the first fund announced in 2019 and an action in 2020 that kick-started the carbon removal market in the carbon removal industry, with some direct purchases and, more recently, obviously, with the announcement and the creation of frontiers and advanced markets commitment, um that you will tok about today for for the benefit of the group. so nearly a billion dollar, along with alphabet, meta, shopify and and mckinsey, really with the objective of accelerating the market for carbon removal and getting to the necessary scale that that we need to have. um, so, before we hear from you, uh, maybe a quick overview of the hour that we have in front of us. so we'll, we're very eager to hear from you, from you on frontier, its origin, its objectives, and then we'll have a discussion after those 10 minutes, a discussion on its impact on the markets, the challenges and maybe the next steps that are ahead of of you and and the team, and we'll close with some questions from from the audience, um, obviously. so, thanks again very much, uh for being here and we look for forward your presentation and starting that about frontier. thanks very much. great thanks, julie for the introduction and hi everybody. um, it's great to be in a virtual room with you. um, i'm gonna share my screen if i can. great, okay, perfect. um, i'm going to spend 10 or 15 minutes toking a little bit about what frontier is, the origins of frontier and sort of what we're aiming to do over the next, uh, eight years. so, um, please keep track of questions that you have and julie will facilitate those at the end. so, as julie mentioned, we just announced frontier, which is an advanced market commitment to buy almost a billion dollars of permanent carbon removal by 2030, um funded by this initial suite of founding companies. before i tok about frontier, i'll tok a little bit about the genesis of it. um, so where did we start? um, stripe is a company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. we are not a clinical climate company and our foray into carbon removal really started in 2019 as a small corporate kind of um, a very small corporate commitment for a million dollars to buy permanent carbon removal and, importantly, we sort of said that we would buy this at any available price. we were not looking to buy the cheapest ton that we could find. the initial purchase was, uh, really grounded in climate science, right. so this is a chart that i'm sure many are very familiar with. but in addition to emissions reduction, we are also going to need to do a huge amount of carbon removal to achieve global net zero, and while we have some of the solutions that we need today to do that, like planting trees and soil carbon sequestration, it's very unlikely that those solutions by themselves are going to get us to the roughly six gigatons per year of carbon removal that we're going to need by 2050. ish sort of obviously depends on the model you're looking at, but for shorthand we'll say six, six billion tons a year by 2050.. um, part of the reason that we are going to need these, right, is that we are going to run out of arable land, right, you can only plant so many trees before you don't have- uh, you don't have- additional um acreage that you need also for other things like growing food and other important uses. the problem with the sort of companies, the, the solutions in that like blue chunk at the bottom, the, the quote-unquote new solutions that we're going to need, is that, first of all, they barely exist and, second of all, the solutions that do exist are really early and their early solutions tend to be really expensive. um, this is a sort of a similar phenomenon that we've seen in solar panels and hard drive and dna sequencing or even tesla. right, uh, new tiknologies start off really expensive and they get cheaper over time as they scale. and so we sort of said we're effectively buying the tesla roadsters of these companies with the idea that if they have the ability to get to a low cost and a high volume in the future, we're happy to be an early purchaser to help them sort of accelerate down that trajectory. that was the initial thinking behind our, our initial million dollars, and we came up with a set of target criteria to sort of characterize the gap that we saw in solutions and really define what it is we're looking for. there are a number of criteria, but i'll highlight the top four, because i think this is what makes us a little bit different from other purchasers. first, we're looking for carbon that is permanently stored, which we generally tok about as more than a thousand years. we also wanted to take advantage of carbon sinks that are not constrained by arable land, and this really gets back to the point that, um, some of the mature solutions today that we have are tend to be, you know, very land hungry, and so we need to complement those with other solutions that don't that, don't do that. and then the last two- cost of capacity- were okay, if these solutions are expensive and small scale to today, so long as they have a glide path to being sub 100 a ton at scale and more than half a gigaton a year. so we want it to be a meaningful, have the potential to be a meaningful chunk of the portfolio with our initial million dollars. um, well, this is a 14 companies with a bit more than that million dollars, but essentially, the kind of things that we're looking at here are really all over the map in terms of the kinds of approaches that they're taking. right, it's climb works. um, of course, pioneering some direct air capture. we have charm which is pyrolyzing waste biomass and injecting that underground is bio-oil, running tide which is growing kelp in the open oceans and then sinking it. so, just to give you a flavor, there's a lot of different ways to approach carbon removal, um, and we, by the way, need to see a lot more than you know, than these, uh, than these approaches that you're seeing. but, um, just to give you a flavor, it's not all direct air capture, it's not all one thing. there's really a range of solutions and we're gonna need a portfolio. so after we made our initial million dollar announcement, two things happened. one, the carbon removal community had sort of a strangely positive reaction, which mostly told us that this field had been so starved for customers that anybody really cared about an initial million dollars. and the second thing that happened was we got a lot of outreach from stripe businesses that you know. stripe has 2 million plus businesses all over the world and a number of them reached out saying: hey, you know, we wanted to do something in climate for a while, but we haven't. it's hard to figure out what to do. if we give you some money, could you figure out what to do with it? and it was the combination of those two insights that ultimately formed the genesis of what's now called stripe climate, and this is generally sort of phase two right. phase one is the initial million dollar corporate commitment. phase two is stripe climate, which aggregates uh funds from any company that wants to opt in. we pool those together and use it to buy even more carbon removal down the cost curve. and this is, you know, takes a business: three clicks to set up and they'll direct an ongoing fraction of their revenue to carbon removal. at the end of 2021, we had more than 20 000 users. we had spent 15 million dollars across those 14 companies that that you just saw, and we were the first customer for 11 of 14 of them. just to give you a sense for how early this ecosystem really is. so about um around this time last year- actually, no, i guess it.

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Side investing (VC School) + Stripe's Nan Ransohoff: Frontier carbon removal | 1454

all right, everybody. it is another sunday edition, our favorite twofer, including this week in climate startups. and, of course, we do vc sunday school, where we tok about uh, investors in a fund doing side investments. can you do side investments if you're working at a venture on? the answer may surprise you. we got a lot of stuff. we got stuff about how large tik companies are helping in areas of innovation, how much it actually costs you to be a gp. i love our blended sunday show because there is someone for everyone and this is going to be a great one. a little something for everyone. yes, it's going to be a great show. stik with us this week in startups is brought to you by thorn. thorne empowers people to take control of their long-term well-being with a proactive, science-based approach to health. through a variety of at-home tests, thorn teaches you about what your body needs and provides the right high-quality, certified nutritional supplements for you to get started and take ten percent off your first order. head to thorn dot com. slash u, slash, twist. wealthfront. wealthfront makes it easy to invest and easy to grow your savings with a diversified portfolio that balances your other riskier bets to start building your wealth and get your first five thousand dollars managed for free. go to wealthfrontcom. twist and open phone. as a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them, open phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. visit open phone dot co. slash twist to get twenty percent off your first six months. hey, everybody, it's sunday time for sunday school. uh, molly has got a couple of investments under her belt. she's loving her job. here we are. it's may. she's been here making a great impact on the pod. uh, four great months. and i'm putting up some numbers in the investment category. so what's your question this week? uh, molly, about being a venture capitalist. well, this is so interesting because this is a question i had already had. and then justin producer justin read this interesting artikle in bloomberg about how yuri milner's dst global actually encourages personal investments from partners into early stage companies. i this had. i had previously had a question about like, should we be in the syndicate? did we do that? and then also someone, a friend, was asking me: like, do you have to be an investor? do you have to be an lp in your own fund. okay, and, and, and i think in venture deals they tok about how some gps do in fact have a personal capital responsibility. so there's a bunch of questions in there, but the first one. let's start with the very first one, which is: what's the deal with side investing? okay, it's a. it's a great question. uh, this is really about communication and outcomes. okay, let's start with communication. do your lp's, your limited partners who are backing your fund, understand that you're doing this? in the case of yuri milner and dst global, i think he's largely investing his own money- i don't know that for certain- and so he can make the rules. um, if it was like a family office situation and somebody invest 25k or 50k and uber or airbnb in the seed round, he would look at it like the sequoia scouts program and then maybe they bring the next deal to them. the only problem with this is if this was a regular fund like, let's say, ours and i went and did a rogue investment and it turns into another uber situation or robin hood or com, right, and then the lp's missed out on that, i now, as the general partner gp, have to explain to them. you know, you gave me your money to invest. you trusted that my deal flow was awesome. i met robin hood at a bar. i gave them money and you weren't included in it. i already have this issue where somebody's like i was in launch fund one and launch fund three and where was this investment? i'm like that was launch run two. you skipped it. you didn't get back to us and get us the paperwork in time and then, right, it's not my fault, it's theirs, but they're just like, oh, how did i miss it? why did you let me miss it? you know? so you have this like regrets. yeah, so the overwhelming rule is: you do not invest outside of your fund because, on a hygiene basis, you will have problems, and that's where the outcome- right. so the communication is one thing, and then the outcome: what if you actually hit a home run? what this also does for, uh, people who are working at a venture firm is it makes it very easy to say no to their friends. we're like, hey, can you give me 25k, can you give me 10k? it's like i'm not allowed to invest outside of my fund and my fund is not allowed to invest in movies, albums, pizzerias, retail stores, direct consumer. so for me, when people email me, can you invest in my movie? i said, well, i'm not allowed to invest outside of my fund and i don't like to lose money, uh, so i don't invest in movies or some joke like that. but, um, you can. there can be exceptions. there's something called an pack, uh, limited. what does it stand for again? um, right, there is a group of people who are like you're bored of a venture firm- sorry, i'm a little tired today. um, stayed up too late playing parker. the uh, the uh. elpac will. then, uh, can give you an exception. so if you did want to invest in your brother's pizzeria, you could just go to them and say, hey, this is outside our mandate, do you mind if i invest? i don't like to do all that now. with a syndicate and a de minimis amount, you could say anybody in the company is allowed to invest under five thousand dollars in a private company. um, we just asked that you let us know, right, so you inform us, so we at least can track it. know, you have that conflict. so if you went and you invested in something that's a calm competitor and then the com founders find out about it, they're upset. oh, you let molly invest in. you know, um, what's the really bad meditation app that everybody hates and unsubscribes from headspace? um, you know, like, if they were, you would invest in that. i'm choking, don't come at me headspace people. you know, i'm team cobb, i'm just joking, i'm trolling you. what do you want from me? what do you want from me? this is awesome. investments: you're invested. how competitive and deranged must you be to actually go off on meditation just because they're competing? i just arranged jacob. well, and then, what about this question of, like, we're, as you know, as a managing director, i'm invested in all of our investments. what about this question of like, should we also? and? and we have the syndicate model, so it's a little bit different, right, but like, what about this question of, i guess, the double dip, like, well, yeah, no, gps, whatever makes sense- are expected collectively in a fund. so we are a solo gp fund, uh, but at places where, like you know, there's six people at benchmark who are in the fund, they're expected to be one percent, two percent of the funds. two hundred million dollar fund, they're supposed to be two to four million. there's six of them. you know, whatever it is 500k, 750k, a million dollars each. what that shows to the gp, to the lps, is that the gps have skin in the game, okay, and the more skin you have in the game, the easier it is to put money in. so there are places like sequoia or andreessen, horowitz or chamoth where i- i think chamath has been public about this many times. i think at some point he was 25 or 35 percent of his funds. somebody like saks might have a significant amount of money in their fund. so, you know, you come into that fund. you're some endowment. it's like, yeah, the principal, the gp who started the fund, has 10 million dollars in this. yeah, as an example, when we had our 10 million dollar funds, i think i had somewhere between two and five percent of those. i put 200 to 500 000 in there. uh, you know which is or isn't a lot of money, depending on, uh, you know, uh, who's looking at it. but it's definitely skin in the game, right, and i gotta, when the cap roll call goes out, i gotta put money in, right. so, right, right, uh, it's a very cool th.

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SaaS Fundamentals 08 - Subscriber management with the customer portal

once you have that full customer onboarding in place and you're giving access to paid features, you'll inevitably start to have support requests where customers want to change their payment method on file, upgrade and downgrade before between different tiers and plans and maybe they'll want to cancel their plan. they may want to even see their invoice history. all of this is stuff that you would need to build if there weren't the customer portal. so the stripe customer portal again is this very nice stripe hosted surface where you can redirect customers to and they can handle all of their customer life cycle management directly inside of the customer portal. once they're done, they can be redirected back to your site. tiknically, you could Implement all of this yourself. it's all available through the API: updating payment methods on file, changing the subscription, maybe moving between different plan levels or moving from monthly to annual. that's all available through the stripe API and if you wanted to implement that yourself, you totally could. however, it's much, much faster if you just rely on and depend on the stripe customer portal. this is going to save you a ton of time if the Investments That stripe is making in the customer portal to improve how localized it is, all of the different features, the different configurations that are available will save you a ton of time. so in my experience from building SAS applications and businesses in the past, this was one of the most onerous projects that anyone had to undertake was managing billing and setting up all these interfaces for customers to cancel their plan or change between plans. and now you can offload all of that to stripe with a single API call to create this thing called a customer portal session. [Music]. all right, so let's take a look at how that works. right now we're able to access our dashboard, but what we want to do is add a button here that will bring us to the customer portal. we're going to head back into the terminal and rails G controller. we're going to generate a new controller called Billings. before we forget, let's go over to our routes and add this new resource or billing, and in our Billings controller we're going to add a show route where we're going to create the billing portal session and redirect there. but again, we want to ensure that we have a logged in user here. so we're going to say before action: authentikate user. now we're going to create a billing portal session now because we're using the page M. this is really easy. we can just say current user, dot. payment processor, Dot billing portal, and then we redirect to billing portal, session dot URL. we need to allow other hosts again because the billing, the customer portal, is again hosted on a stripe domain and the status will again be C other. now, from our dashboard show page, we need to just add a link here that's going to go to manage billing. this will be the the billing path and we are redirected to the customer portal. now, through our testing, we have a bunch of different payment method types in here, so let's actually go back and log out. we'll join today as a brand new user or signing up from scratch, heading over to our pricing, and we're going to go to our monthly billing for the 28 a month plan. that seems like a good plan. we'll enter in some test card details here and we're going to say that we are in San Francisco, California, so we do have to pay some tax for this. we also want to subscribe. you can notike. if we wanted to, we could save our information for one click checkout. we are also donating one percent of the subscription. help fight climate change, all right? so let's go over to our dashboard and now we have this manage billing link. click on manage billing and now we are redirected to the customer portal and we see that we have just one plan. if we wanted to, we can update our plan. we can switch between annual and monthly, again for all of our different price points here, if we wanted to, let's go switch to the annual plan for startups again. if you wanted to, you can change the unit amount here for the startup. this is for, like, the number of seats. this is controlled via the portal config. let's head over to the dashboard and see how we can configure the customer portal. we want to go to settings in test mode and we're going to our customer portal settings under the billing section. now there's a lot of different stuff that you can enable or configure here, but the most important thing I want to show you is that our products here are again need to follow that exact modeling of our other products. now, one of the things that we wanted to disable was being able to control the subscription quantities, because our application only supports one subscription at one level. there's not like separate seats. so we're going to save that and now, when we come back over to our billing settings, we can no longer control the the number of seats. so now we can confirm that and our subscription is now fully updated. we will receive some web hook notifications in the back end and those are going to be handled by the pagem and again now we can just see our dashboard. everything is provisioned. so that really offloads a lot of the work of the full customer lifecycle management to the customer portal and that wraps up our entire demo. we really appreciate your time and attention. hopefully this was useful. thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one.

Stripe vs PayPal Comparison: Which is Better for YOU?

which of these two payment processors should you use- stripe or paypal? in this video, i'm going to tok about the differences between the two payment processors, which one is going to be cheaper and more affordable for you and which one is better from a tiknical standpoint too. natalie lucier, founder of access ally, which is a wordpress based solution for online courses, memberships and communities. i've personally been using both of these platforms, both as a user who is making payments online and as a online course and membership site creator who is selling online courses. so i want to give you a little bit of background on why i'm able to compare both of these options. so i've been creating online courses and selling memberships for over a decade online now, and it's a really cool thing that we're able to just sign up for one of these two tools and immediately start taking payments on your courses and your memberships and your communities. and by the end of this video, you'll know which of these two is the right one for you or if you should be using both. so let's rewind to when i first got started online. so paypal was pretty much the only game in town. stripe didn't exist yet, and so, of course, i used paypal, and i also ended up getting my own merchant through my bank and that meant that i had to set up a little bit more complicated systems to take payments and i ended up really enjoying the paypal way to go, because you could just go ahead, grab some code from the paypal website and stik it up on your website to start taking payments. you didn't need a shopping cart, you didn't need anything fancy, and that is still the case today, and in fact paypal has added more flexibility and functionality and i'll get into that a little bit more later. but if you think about the historical side of paypal, it started off with shipping on ebay a lot. so if you do have physical goods that you need to send out, then maybe paypal is a better option because you do get all of the cool things that you can do, at least in the us, where you can print out shipping labels and all of that stuff to pre-pay your postage, and that can be very convenient. now, when stripe came on the marketplace, it was really designed for developers and customization of the payment experience, so this is a really cool thing. you don't have to be a developer to use stripe, but because stripe has such great developer focused resources. people like ourselves who develop software can really do cool things with strength. so some of the biggest benefits for stripe, in my opinion, are the cool things you can do with it. so if you want to do a lot of recurring payments, you can do things like pausing a subscription and resuming a subscription. you could give people some credits. you could change the amount of money that somebody owes you. so, for example, if you want to give them a price break or give them essentially a coupon, you can go ahead and do that directly. you can also change the next due date for a payment, and all of that can be done through something like access ally, which manages all of your payments and subscriptions through stripe. now, on the other hand, with paypal, you really have almost zero control once a payment is made through paypal, and that's because paypal manages all the payment side of things automatikally, and so you can't go in and change a subscription or pause it and resume it, and you really can't do as much. now, paypal is great for a small one-time payment, but once you get into subscriptions with paypal, that's when things get a little hairy and where i do not recommend using paypal, and that's because when somebody signs up on paypal for a payment plan or a recurring subscription, they can log into their own paypal account and cancel it. so that really is hard if you're the one selling your subscription or your membership with a payment plan, because you can't control what happens at that point. so if you're using access ally, you will be notified and you could have an automation that follows up with this person says, hey, what gives, why did you cancel your subscription or your payment plan? come back over to the site and complete it now. but the thing is, once they do that, you really don't have a whole lot of recourse to get them to complete their payments. so this is a really key point that i think anyone who's doing subscriptions or installment plans need to know before they start using paypal for these types of payments. now let's tok about fees for both of these platforms. so in the past, paypal and stripe had exactly the same fees, but this has recently changed and paypal has increased their fees. so for stripe you're looking at paying at 2.9 plus 30 cents per transaction. so that means if you have a lot of small sales, you'll pay those 30 cents a lot, and if you have a bigger sale, you'll just pay that transaction fee once, but then you'll also pay that 2.9 percent of the payment. now for paypal, depending on your volume and the type of account that you have, you might be looking at paying 2.59 to all the way to 3.49 plus 49 cents transaction fee. so that means that each transaction costs you more and there's also potentially a higher percentage. so i know it seems like it could be on the lower side- and it might be if you have a certain size business, but for most people you will actually end up paying more on paypal. so i highly recommend running the numbers and just seeing how strike compares for you. chances are that stripe will be cheaper and a better option. now, speaking of fees, both platforms will keep the fees if somebody refunds. so this is a really big deal and there are not a lot of platforms that don't do this, unfortunately. but what happens is if somebody pays for something- let's say it's 100- and then they ask for a refund, you've already paid that transaction fee and that percentage and then you don't pay any additional fees to refund that money back to them, but you also don't get back the fees that you paid in the first place. so that would be that two point nine percent or three ish percent, depending on what it is for paypal on your account. so that means you are paying out money even if somebody purchases and refunds, unfortunately. now, since we're toking about money, let's tok about how quickly you can access your funds through these two payment processors. so for stripe, they have a really good regular schedule where you can auto deposit your income through your bank account every one to two days and they are pretty known to be on schedule. so if you depend on this income to pay your contractors or pay employees or anything else like paying rent and things like that, they are very, very dependable, and there have been instances where they could potentially hold your funds if you have a big refund or a big charge back, but for the most part, stripe is really good at paying out your funds on a regular basis. now paypal has a similar system where you get your funds immediately and they are deposited into, essentially, your paypal bank account, which is your paypal digital wallet, and the great thing is you can use it immediately. so if you had to purchase something else using paypal, you could use it right away. now. that's a great advantage. however, if you want to get that money into your bank account, you have to do it manually and you have to initiate a transfer out of paypal into your bank account, which can take another one to two days. so it is similar to stripe, except that if you wanted to automate the disbursement of your funds into your bank account so that every time you got paid on paypal it got to your bank account, paypal charges a 1.5 fee to do that. so you would actually have less revenue to have that automated. so again, in my mind, stripe is way more of a winner in this case. now, one big benefit for paypal is that it is a very well-known brand and people who have a paypal account have a little bit more trust when they are purchasing with paypal, and what that means is especially in international places where they don't have a credit card or a deb.

CarbonPlan, Stripe, Charm Leaders on Carbon Removal

what we need to tok about now is how we get negative, how we go below zero, and i think let's start with danny: make the case for why at all we are toking about carbon removal when we are still pumping out 40 billion tons a year. i think that's so. that's the right place to start, and the right place to start and solving the problem is cutting those emissions. so i think we're all probably here on this stage in agreement on that point. but the reason we need to tok about removal is net zero is what's required to stabilize planetary temperatures and when you look at the pathways to decarbonizing the economy, we know there's a couple of sectors that are going to be difficult. so there might be some residual emissions even when we make our best efforts. i like to start, but just by thinking about the agricultural sector. we use a lot of nitrogen-based fertilizers. we put out nitrogen pollution that is part of a long-term warming scenario and just interacting with that piece of the the greenhouse gas emissions puzzle, you get to the need for gigaton scale carbon removal if you want to balance out just the residual nitrogen emissions from the electricity or, sorry, from the agricultural sector, and you can imagine needing to do that in other sectors as well. so we know we need to get there. yeah, i mean, this is a thing that you know- not everybody who's clued into climate change knows- which is that only about 75 of the the climate problem is co2- right, a quarter of the problem is all other gases. this is methane, this is nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide a little bit, and so even if we cut co2 emissions, stop burning fossil fuels, they're going to have this residual greenhouse gas problem that will require us to go negative on the co2, which sort of cools the planet, but uh allows us to get to a safer uh target. maybe, you know, if we get to net negative after 2070, we could actually get to 1.5 degrees celsius. now, this is a tiknology that we will need at scale decades later. um, but we, if we want a decade later, as we know, with solar or with batteries, which were invented decades ago, we're going to have to start on that problem now. uh, and and then stripe. you've been working on trying to make that happen, which you know. it's a little bit weird that a payments company is doing carbon removal, but maybe let's just start there. why do you do it and how do you do it. so our sort of hypothesis stripe has been that part of the reason that carbon removal has been so stuck in the mud is that there have been no customers to pay for that carpet removal. unlike energy, there's no intrinsic value of most carbon removal. if you're pulling it out of the sky or ocean and storing it somewhere, you can never use it and, as a result, very few want to pay for it. i think the thing that makes it partikularly challenging is that there are lower cost alternatives, and so new tiknologies that are going to be important in developing the portfolio of solutions we'll need in the future basically don't exist today, and the ones that do are super expensive. they're like the tesla roadsters of these tiknology, and they haven't gotten cheap yet. so our theory at stripe, which started as a pretty small corporate commitment for a million dollars back in 2019, was: we're gonna spend that million dollars, you know, uh, not looking for the maximum number of tons at the cheapest price, but instead trying to buy carbon removal from companies that we think have the potential to be low cost and high volume in the future, even if they're not there today, with the idea that you know, if you're an entrepreneur, why would you start a company if you're going to have no buyers? if you're an investor, why would you invest in a company that has no revenue? if we can give these companies more customers, then hopefully the sort of theory of change is that it unlocks a lot of other parts of the ecosystem. so we started with a million bucks from stripe. we turn that into a lot more uh, by building a software product that makes it easy for stripe stripes users to donate a fraction of their revenue to carbon removal, which we then pull together and use it to buy even more carbon removal. and then last week we launched- two weeks ago. we launched- something called frontier, which is an advanced market commitment for carbon removal. um, it's a 925 million dollar commitment from stripe, google, shopify, meta and alphabet to basically do this over the next nine years. and the point is essentially to send a big demand signal to all the entrepreneurs we need working on this, all the investors we need investing in this, that there is going to at least be the seed of a market. um, and it's compelling for them to spend their time on. now. that's the best segue to get to peter to tok about all the wacky ideas around carbon removal. but before we get there, you could have just bought offsets for two dollars a ton, or maybe 50 cents a ton if you search for it on the un carbon neutral website, danny. why can't we do that? well, there's a couple of reasons. we maybe shouldn't- i guess some people are. one thing is that very few of these offsets deliver carbon removal. most offsets are paying people to not pollute in the first place, which something we need to do, and we can't get to net zero if everybody's trying to pay one another not to pollute and justifying their own pollution in that way. um, but i think maybe the broader reason is: i think a lot of the voluntary offsets market is very low quality and the claims that are being made by those credits don't actually deliver the carbon services that we want. and i think one of the key distinctions that that stripe- and now with frontier- is making is, instead of trying to find the cheapest, which often means the lowest quality, they're defining quality first and they're saying: how can we deploy this fund most effectively? how can we bring into existence the companies and strategies that are delivering real carbon removal services, rather than sort of paper claims that don't hold up when you dig into them. so peter's going to tell us about a wacky idea. then i want each of you to tell me about your favorite wacky idea. i mean, you'll have to pick a favorite from your kids who you fund, nan, so start, uh, yeah, so i run a company called charm industrial and we offer carbon removal in the form of bio-oil sequestration. so this is a new carbon dioxide removal method as of two years ago that my co-founder, sean, cooked up, and the idea is that we take waste agricultural residue, things like corn stover or sugarcane, degas or wheat, straw, timber, slash all this waste cellulose that is already captured co2 and we cook it into a liquid called bio oil. it's not actually oil, it's actually mostly water and acetik acid and a bunch of other stuff. so we take that liquid that's super rich in carbon and we inject it deep underground, thousands of feet down into old oil reservoirs, old oil and gas formations, and so you have co2 captured in the plants, turned into a liquid and injected underground. and uh, you know, stripe was actually our first customer. uh, we probably would not have moved forward with this pathway that we sort of accidentally discovered if uh, stripe hadn't showed up like a week later and and made the first purchase, so it was incredibly catalytik for us and the last two years since we went to this. we completed the first injection in january of 2021, a little over a year ago, and last year we sequestered about 5400 tons of co2 equivalent, which, well, a very small number in the scheme of things, as far as we know, is about 90 of all the permanent carbon removals that were delivered last year, and so that should be shocking in its own right that only 6000 tons was delivered, and that's what we can do in uh two years. so you know, 2017, not a problem, right? yeah, yeah, we only have to grow. we only have to grow like a factor of two million uh in the next 28 years, uh, which is like 65 percent year-over-year growth compounded uh twice as fast as software. easy, easy, uh, your wacky idea man. uh, well, i'm partikularly excited about ideas.