Everybody in the Pool

Trillions of dollars worth of goods move around the planet every year, and a shocking amount is lost, spoiled, or discarded. That wasted food, medicine, and equipment isn’t just a business problem; it’s a massive, underappreciated climate problem.This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly talks with Krenar Komoni, CEO and founder of Tive, a supply chain visibility company that helps businesses track and monitor shipments in real time. What started as a GPS tracker for his father-in-law's trucking company has grown into one of the fastest-growing companies in supply chain tech. Tive’s small-but-mighty trackers don’t just follow a shipment’s location — they also monitor temperature, light, and shock along the way, helping businesses intervene before a load of strawberries (or a shipment of vaccines) becomes a very expensive, very wasteful problem.We talk about:Why real-time shipment visibility is a key ingredient in creating a greener supply chainHow temperature monitoring can save hundreds of thousands of dollars of food and medicine from going to wasteWhat "permanent disruption" and climate change means for global supply chainsHow route data is helping companies find faster, more fuel-efficient paths they didn't know existedTive's commitment to sustainability in its own products, including lithium-free trackers and a tracker recycling programWhy AI agents will be hungry for real-time supply chain data, and what that could unlock for global efficiencyKrenar's 10-year vision: tracking 5-10% of all global shipments (and why that would be a very big deal)Links:Tive: https://www.tive.com/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Data centers don't exactly have a reputation for being climate heroes… but what if they could be? This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Jasper de Vries, co-founder and CEO of Lucend, to talk about the surprisingly wild world of data center optimization — and why the industry has been leaving billions of dollars and millions of megawatt hours on the table.In this conversation, Jasper explains how Lucend’s platform uses machine learning and sensor data to make data centers dramatically more efficient. He also lays out a vision for the industry’s future; one where data centers generate their own renewable power, store it in batteries, and feed flexibility back to the grid on demand.We talk about:Why data centers are sitting on a goldmine of untapped efficiency, and why they haven't captured it until nowHow Lucend uses 280 billion sensor readings to open up the "black box" of data center operations, saving customers an average of 25% on energy and 30% on waterWhy it’s so hard to make even the smallest changes in how a data center operatesHow "transparent AI" builds operator trust by showing every step of the recommendation processThe water vs. energy trade-off in cooling, and why it's more complicated than headlines suggestWhy Scope 3 emissions from hardware are the dirty secret behind Big Tech's broken climate pledgesThe vision for data centers as flexible grid assets, and what’s needed to get them thereLinks:Lucend: https://www.getlucend.com/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Less than 2% of all philanthropic giving goes to climate, and a big reason why is something Greg Rock calls "donor paralysis." People care, but the landscape is so complex that many well-meaning donors don’t take action.This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Greg Rock, Executive Director of 1.5°Climate, a free national donor collaborative that's borrowing the energy of VC pitch competitions to make climate philanthropy more accessible, more exciting, and more impactful. With 600+ members and $35 million moved to over 100 organizations, 1.5°Climate is proving that you don’t have to be a billionaire, or an expert in climate tech, to make a real difference.We talk about:Why less than 2% of philanthropic giving goes to climate, and what we can do to change thatHow 1.5°Climate's Shark Tank-style virtual pitch events connect donors directly with vetted climate organizationsThe three criteria that define a high-impact climate investment: catalytic potential, leverage, and gap-fillingWhy 1.5°Climate funds nonprofits that aren’t exclusively climate organizations like cattle trade associations and agricultural projectsHow the team shifted from federal to state and local climate action after the 2024 electionThe innovations Greg and 1.5°Climate are most excited about right now: next-gen geothermal, agrivoltaics, and moreLinks:1.5°Climate: https://onepointfiveclimate.org/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s no shortage of stats to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of our food waste problem: A whopping 40% of food grown for human consumption goes to waste; $400 billion worth of food gets thrown away every year in the U.S — roughly 1.5% of GDP; Food waste is responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Must we go on?That’s why, after building the Nest Thermostat, Harry Tannenbaum and Matt Rogers turned their attention to our kitchens. They created Mill, a sleek appliance that quietly turns your food scraps into an odorless, coffee-ground-like material, and in the process, began changing the way people think about what they buy and throw away.And Mill isn’t stopping at our kitchen counters. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Harry returns to the show to talk about how Mill is turning their attention to the places where food waste really piles up: grocery stores, restaurants, stadiums, and beyond.We talk about:Why food waste is a $400 billion problem hiding in plain sight, and why nobody’s actually measuring itHow the data Mill collects is already changing consumer behavior, and what that means at commercial scaleWhat Mill Commercial looks like: a modular, dishwasher-sized unit that processes hundreds of pounds of food per dayThe Whole Foods partnership: deploying Mill infrastructure across all locations by 2027, backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge fundWhy dehydrated food waste going directly to chickens is a tighter, more valuable loop than compostingThe vision for residential distribution: bundled with waste services or utilities, the way Nest thermostats scaled through utilitiesLinks:Mill: https://mill.com/All episodes: https://everybodyinthepool.com/Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The grid is getting smarter, cleaner, and infinitely more complicated all at once. Enter Gridmatic, a company using artificial intelligence to do what old-school grid modeling can’t: predict when the wind will blow, when prices will spike, and exactly when to charge or discharge a battery.This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly is joined by David Miller, Chief Commercial Officer at Gridmatic, to nerd out about why managing a grid full of renewables is so much harder than managing one full of coal and gas, and what it actually takes to make renewable energy reliable at scale.We talk about:Why forecasting renewable output is so much harder than forecasting demandHow Gridmatic uses AI to predict real-time price spikes a full day ahead and position batteries accordinglyWhy Texas's grid interconnection queue has ballooned to 230 gigawatts when the state only uses 90 on its hottest dayWhat "Controllable Load Resources" are, and why they might be the key to unlocking faster grid interconnection for data centersThe crucial missing link between the vision of virtual power plants and actual grid reliability, and how software finally closes that loopLinks:Gridmatic: https://www.gridmatic.com/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.