The Index Company for Climate

Did you know scientists think Turkeys are the second dumbest animal in the world? To me, they seem pretty confident. Wandering around fields, doing anything they please. Whatever the science community says, I bet a dumb turkey can still spot markets poised for significant growth.

Today, we have these tremendous fucking opportunities compounding in markets like eCommerce, genomics, and crypto, to name a few. Following the advice of Angel Investor Elid Gil, you should ask yourself, “what companies are an index of their underlying market”?

Index companies often wedge themselves in the middle of every expanding market, acting as a bridge or necessary tool to enable others in their space. They tend to be infrastructure every player in the market needs to operate and compete.

For example, it is hard to launch ABC without using XYZ. These Index companies are undoubtedly the best way to broadly participate in the market without worrying about how they win in it.

Some example index companies are Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase, Airbnb, SpaceX, and NVIDIA. Maybe even Zoom? These are all companies that have already returned 10X on their initial investment, but what about ClimateTech? How about that considerable opportunity? We all know it’s an enormous problem. Compounding. Every single day.

We are at the beginning of an unprecedented opportunity. Watch for all the companies that will undoubtedly flood this space. Like John Doerr & Michael Moritz, only a few lucky hounds have invested in this 50 person company called Watershed to date. Along with this startup, you’ll hear a flurry of new acronyms like climate governance, enterprise carbon accounting, carbon supply chain. Watershed is def·i·nite·ly an index company; they will bridge every company looking to measure their carbon footprint. Without Watershed, it will be hard to become NetZero (another short acronym you should know) by 2050.

By 2030 your business might be trying to prove “efforts” in reducing carbon emissions. Reducing carbon is a math problem, a metric every company needs to measure meticulously. Again, I’ll phrase this another way. It will be hard for every company to measure progress without carbon accounting software. Climate is a growth market, and I’m betting on Watershed to be the index of this underlying market.