Member Spotlight: Wherobots, Part 2
For the second of our two-part series on Wherobots, I interviewed Maxime Petazzoni, the company’s Head of Engineering. We discussed the Wherobots company culture, the growing attainability of climate neutrality, and the role of software in climate innovation.
Will Hespe: How should a tech company approach climate neutrality?
Maxime Petazzoni: Just like tech companies lead with research and innovation, they must set an example by being good stewards of our planet and our environment. Climate change is a real and urgent issue for all of humanity, and we know it disproportionately impacts the less fortunate. I see being climate neutral as the bare minimum for tech companies in the 21st century, and it's getting easier every day, as frameworks for calculating your carbon footprint are now well understood and exercised, and markets for high-quality carbon offsets have developed.
Tech companies, especially pure software companies, also have the benefit of dealing mostly with Scope 3 emissions, with employee travel and cloud resources representing the vast majority of emission sources. With that said, climate neutrality shouldn't be seen as something that can be tacked on top. It needs to be built into the company's culture, across its team and its leadership, with sustainability and environmental responsibility as core values. On the engineering side, teams can make technical choices with reduction of resource usage as a high order bit. Even something as high-level as the choice of cloud provider region can have a huge impact on carbon emissions from cloud use, as their power mix varies.
At the end of the day, companies need to dedicate resources to tracking and accounting their carbon emissions, to push forward efforts to reduce them, and eventually to put their money where their mouth is and purchase the corresponding high-quality carbon offsets.
Will Hespe: Do you have a story from your time at Wherobots that is emblematic of the company culture?
Maxime Petazzoni: A company's culture is the result of its people and the ethos that they bring into their work. The team at Wherobots are high-agency, with a strong bias to action. Over time, this creates a really high-trust environment of people that not only get stuff done, but autonomously deliver with high quality.
I have a story about the first time our leadership team came to 9Zero, a couple of months ago. 9Zero opened during this year’s San Francisco Climate Week, at about the same time we had started looking for an SF office location. We were immediately interested and decided to check it out by having our next leadership collab day there the following week. And in those "spring into action" moments, those values and that company culture shine: within half an hour we had our day planned out, travel booked, lunch plans, our schedule and presentations for the day all figured out, etc. We ended up having a terrific and productive day of collaboration and discussion at 9Zero.
Will Hespe: What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of climate innovation?
Maxime Petazzoni: What excites me the most about climate innovation is that software has an increasingly big role to play. We saw that just last week, with Google's announcements that software and AI-based optimization of container shipping can increase the number of containers shipped while using fewer vessels, opening the door for dramatic reductions in carbon emissions from cargo ships—notable high polluters. There are so many opportunities like this, leveraging the increasing amount of data available about our physical world, and democratizing the availability of insights and value from that data, in service of research, analytics, or better decisions by any company or organization out there.
Will Hespe: What does Wherobots do that no other company can?
Maxime Petazzoni: Wherobots is the Spatial Intelligence Cloud, a unique platform for spatial analytics and AI at planetary scale, which enables businesses and organizations to get high quality insights from spatial data—whether that's from their own private data, and/or from public datasets about our planet.
With Wherobots, those companies and organizations can make better decisions, optimize their business, and bring better products and solutions to their own customers, while reducing their impact on the physical world. More importantly, we can deliver those insights and perform those analytics with never-before-seen performance and speed. This directly translates to lower cost, but also to lower compute resources utilization, which of course reduces the carbon emissions from those intensive applications.
Will Hespe: Why did you choose to join 9Zero?
Maxime Petazzoni: We chose 9Zero because its mission is directly aligned with ours, and for the opportunities our partnership with 9Zero and our involvement in its community will bring forth.
Solving the climate crisis will take research, science, innovation, and engineering in pretty much everything in the world. Bill Gates' book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster does a good job at showing just how comprehensive this process needs to be: from energy production and storage, to manufacturing, transportation, software, etc. 9Zero will be a place where some of that R&D and innovation will take place, and we're excited to be part of the solution.
