Terra.do

Anshuman Bapna is a serial technology and social entrepreneur. He’s started and sold internet businesses across India and the US. In addition, he has also worked at large companies like Google, Deloitte and was last Chief Product Officer at Makemytrip (NASDAQ:MMYT). Anshuman has an undergraduate degree from IIT Bombay and an MBA from Stanford University.

Dr Kamal Kapadia did her PhD in Energy & Resources from University of California, Berkeley and taught climate change at Oxford for 4 years. She's worked at SELCO, Solarcentury - UK's first large scale solar startup and last at Blue Planet Foundation, a clean energy advocacy organization in Hawaii.

Mayank Jain graduated from IIT Bombay in 2000. He was the co-founder (along with Anshuman) of India’s first campus startup (Righthalf.com) that was successfully acquired by Stratify. Mayank ran a $10M family business in the textile industry, while also running Atishae Web, an internet services company.

There is an incredible hunger among talented individuals to work on climate but no understanding of where to start. And yet, climate organizations struggle to attract world-class talent that is available to tech companies and other traditional sectors. 

Terra.do is an online platform for anyone who wants to work on solving climate change. We select talented individuals who care about climate, take them through an intensive 12-week online bootcamp taught by top experts and then get them to work on high-impact climate projects.

To seriously address climate change, we need 100M people across the planet to work on this problem over the next 10 years. Our aim is to make this seamless by running an online climate school that trains individuals and a global internet platform that connects them to climate work. We aim to build something that's equitable and solves for everything ranging from climate tech to environmental justice.

The problem we are trying to solve is to shift the global economy by redeploying the world's workforce at a sufficient scale to address global climate change. 

To fix climate change, we have to decarbonize sectors like energy, agriculture, transportation, construction and manufacturing. These industries are roughly a quarter of world's GDP, and we expect that over 10 years, 100M+ people will transition into these industries and will require education and skill-matching to do so. 

Another promising area is corporate sustainability. These jobs are growing, at least in the US, where there are 800K people with "sustainability" listed in their roles/skills on Linkedin. 58% of large corporations have increased headcount in sustainability in the past 2 years. 86% of all S&P500 companies publish sustainability reports, and these corporates would require a "greening" of all corporate functions. That would require a team approach to learning & implementing sustainability that traditional programs are ill-suited to deliver. 

In general, there's currently no easy way to do this that takes into account the diversity of this talent spread across the globe. We believe the internet can be a transformational force in this.

Terra.do is an online platform for anyone who wants to work on solving climate change.

We select talented individuals who care about climate, take them through an intensive 12-week online bootcamp taught by top experts and then get them to work on high-impact climate projects that leverage their skills through our online collaboration platform.

Our longer term vision is to build a thriving work community online around climate mitigation and adaptation. We have already started this by building a very active Slack community around our course and providing intensive mentoring and career services to students. As this community builds up, we'll open up project work that'll match skills to impactful climate work.

Our target audience are talented individuals, often mid-career, who want to transition into climate work. Their key needs:

1. Understand the climate context - “where’s highest ROI on my time?”

2. Leverage existing skills

3. Be part of a like-minded community - “there are others like me?”

4. Work on high-impact, real projects - “how to scale beyond the lab?”

5. First experiment with working remotely, part-time

We’ve launched our first cohort of learners on May 18th, 2020. This cohort was a big test of whether the idea had any legs. The quality of "students"in the first program is just outstanding. Some examples:

1. Cody Simms - Partner at Techstars (USA)
2. Ryan Barrett - Head of Engineering@Color, Google for 10yrs (USA)
3. Toral Varia - 15 years experience with broadcast print and digital journalism (India)

We engage with the cohort on a daily basis where we have regular office hours to interact with the learners. We leverage our network in the climate world to help them in the development of their 'real world' projects. We are aiding them with a specialized mentorship programme and potentially helping them transition into actual climate work.

Climate change is the issue of the hour. The world is currently in crisis and climate change is something that needs to be solved if we want a planet to live on. 

Our project Terra.do has been the result of trying to make a high impact in the climate space. We want to give millions of people a voice when they answer the question, 'How can I best contribute to solving climate change?'

Our platform wants to build awareness and drive action to solve climate change.

Anshuman had been looking to build a high-impact company in the climate space. Through multiple conversations, two problems became evident. 

1. There was an incredible hunger among talented individuals to work on the climate change problem but no understanding of where to start. 

2. And yet, climate organizations struggled to attract the world-class talent that was available to tech companies and other traditional sectors.  

Together, this suggested a market inefficiency that could be solved by combining a talent marketplace with an online bootcamp.

Through the course of this research, Anshuman met Kamal who had an extensive background in climate work. That's how they decided to start the company together.

Anshuman witnessed the bleaching of the coral reefs at the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and this left a deep impression on him. He has been working in the startup and tech space awhile and wanted to create something that left a tangible impact.

Meeting Kamal who had an extensive background in climate work ensured that Terra.do got its feet off the ground.

Story goes that he was sitting in a cafe in Bangalore called Cafe Terra (completely co-incidental we assure you) and talking loudly about climate change to a friend. A stranger walked up and told him we should talk to his sis-in-law who lives in Hawaii. That was how he met Kamal 8 months ago.

Creating Terra.do is not just a pet project, it is a platform meant to
encourage millions of people to come learn, interact, join a network of
like-minded people and contribute towards solving climate change.

Both Anshuman and Mayank have worked together previously before taking different trajectories. Both of them have experiences as serial tech entrepreneurs. Anshuman has worked at Google and was in the leadership team at a $3B, NASDAQ-listed online travel company that has 100M customers. Mayank has architected complex systems that can handle that level of scale.

Terra.do will require the ability to build a platform that can attract, train and help collaborate millions of people online, and their experience will be critical in building this.

Kamal's extensive background in climate work ensures that there's deep foundational knowledge of what is critical in the climate space. She's also worked across India, Sri Lanka (tsunami relief), UK and US and therefore understands both the world of climate adaptation & resilience and the world of climate policy and action. Her extensive network in academia teaching climate at Oxford, and in the multilateral/foundation world has already helped us have deep conversations & potential partnerships with leading climate organizations and universities.

Climate action is already a part of the curriculum of many educational institutions in the west. However, there's very little happening in India on this front yet. 

A year ago, Anshuman met a well-known educator in India who was affiliated with a university with a sustainability center. They were contemplating starting a climate-focused program, and Anshuman suggested they do it as a hybrid model combining offline & online. There was a lot of resistance to the idea, especially from the Board of the university. Over 6 months, the Terra team worked with them to convince them of the value of bringing together Indian students with a global cohort online, especially for a problem of climate change's global scale. The team agreed to do a pilot for one term.

When Covid hit, there was a sudden scramble to put the University's programs online and Terra's persistence and approach seemed even more prescient. We're now looking to launch the first-of-its-kind hybrid climate education program in the world with them in October 2020.

2005 was an unusual time in Indian politics. A new brigade of young Members of Parliament (MPs) with fresh ideas had just arrived. Big grassroots movements like Right to Information were finally getting closer to becoming legislation. And the internet was becoming mainstream enough to have even political leaders become comfortable with it. 

I was interning with a politician in Delhi. My main insight was that MPs are saddled with enormous responsibilities for not just legislation but also on-ground execution due to the massive gaps in our institutional capacity as a country. To address this, I co-founded Democracy Connect to:

* Create an internship program that got professionals like us to work as aides to MPs

* Work on specific engagements with MPs on identifying the top issues in an MP's constituency, and then getting all local stakeholders together to formulate a plan. Use the talent above to project manage it 

* We also built the world's first crowdsourced legislative support platform that helped MPs get quick feedback on legislative drafts from experts in an open way. 

Over 8 years, we worked closely with 12 MPs on work that affected ~35M people in the country.

At Terra.do, we are addressing a problem that needs our attention right now. The current climate emergency demands that we have people who can focus their gaze on it and work towards creating a sustainable world.

Software has begun to eat the climate world too - e.g precision agriculture, smart grids, remote sensing - and that in a post-Covid world, a lot of this talent will work on a lot of these problems using remote collaboration platforms (like ours).

Fundamentally, none of the scale internet companies in online education (eg Udacity) or talent marketplaces (eg Toptal) exist in the climate space. Current players include non-profit efforts (UN and edX run dry courses on climate) while tiny sites like climate.careers act as job boards. Since this is a new vertical, it'll be critical to integrate learning with work very tightly, and no one has attempted that.

Terra's market is a combination of two large markets (online education, talent marketplaces) intersected with climate industries (energy, agriculture, transportation, construction and manufacturing). These industries are roughly a quarter of world's GDP, and we expect that over 10 years, 10M+ people will transition into these industries and will require education and skill matching to do so. It's tough to get hard numbers on the TAM but directionally, it feels like something that'll start out really small (sub-$100M) but grow into a very large category over the next 5 years.

Our vision is to funnel the top talent in the world into climate work.

We believe there are millions of skilled and talented individuals who are very concerned about climate change. They would like to work directly on solving the problem or applying a climate lens to their existing work.

Our theory of change is all that they need is the right training, connections into the right communities and career support to transition into the climate work space. We are also convinced that without such a mass transition in the work force, we are poorly placed to address the climate problem. Even with the right policies in place, we need people who are skilled in translating policy into action in their respective fields.

This is supported by our experience with and our intimate knowledge of our current cohort as well as hundreds of conversations we have had with potential applicants and skilled professionals across technology, finance and business.

Our current cohort of learners called 'Monarchs' are 20 in number. Not only have we managed to fill it out without any ad spend, our average student pays $400 for the program (we cross-subsidize students from developing countries like India, or those who come from non-profits who can't afford the $999 list price).

In one year, we hope to hit 20K learners and our big goal is to scale to 10M users by 2025.

Phase 1: NETWORK

- Expand programs from 101 into data science, ESG, sustainable supply chains, etc

- Expand learners by powering “climate school” for universities, accelerators, corporations

- Identify all domain experts in climate and make them available for hire by climate companies

- Goal: 20K learners, 10K domain experts, 100K climate community by Q4’2021

Phase 2: PROJECTS

- Bring projects from climate orgs

- Leverage learner+expert network to deliver them

- Build up core service offerings 

- Scale network 10x

- Goal: Deliver projects with 0.5 GtCO2e cumulative impact by end-2023

Phase 3: OPEN PLATFORM

- With climate companies, domain experts and climate workers all on one platform, we'll open it for everyone

- Others build crowdfunding, accelerators, buyer networks, etc

- Goal: Scale to 10M users by 2025

The fundamental barriers to our approach are:

• Finding sufficient climate-motivated individuals around the world who'll be interested in working directly on climate change
• Building a training program that's pedagogically sound and yet deep enough to serve the need of a global audience looking to engage in sectors as diverse as energy, agriculture, transportation, social justice etc
• Ensuring that our cohort has great outcomes - that is, getting them to successfully transition into climate work within 6 months of graduating from our programs

This is our approach to addressing these barriers:

• Build awareness through content being generated by the cohort itself that pushed forward the climate agenda and also creates thought leadership that attracts new members
• Partner with organizations that already attract such individuals - eg universities running sustainability programs, corporations that focus on green goals etc
• Partner with organizations like World Resources Institute who are experts in climate fields to ensure that quality of educational content in our climate programs are up-to-date
• Partner with climate organizations to give us projects that these cohorts can work on, and to act as potential employers

We have a university partnership with Anant National University in India where we'll power their first term for their Masters in Climate Change Management.

1. We charge for our courses. Our typical student (first cohort of 20) pays on an average $399

2. We'll act as a temp hiring/consulting platform for top talent we aggregate on the site and take 30% commission on those

3. In year 3, we'll start staffing projects with our talent and take commissions on those

4. Eventually, when we have a substantial % of climate talent and climate companies on the platform, we'll open it up for others to build use cases on top of it.

Our vision is to funnel the top talent in the world into climate work.

We intend to be a profitable company that can funnel profits back into our work to scale the company even more. We'll be raising investment capital from angel investors who're motivated by solving climate change and later, from institutional investors.

We've bootstrapped the company so far. We earned $10K from our first cohort in May.

We're looking to raise $800K in equity funding by Aug 2020.

Our estimated expenses for the next 12 months are $550K.

Our mission requires us to reach out and identify talent across the globe, and across a diverse range of sectors. What's attractive to us about The Elevate Prize is the scale and breadth of its network of partner organizations and experts. In addition, the mentoring support and visibility accorded to winners of the prize will help further our mission.

We'd love to have this help from The Elevate Prize:

• Partnerships with multilateral institutions with a mission to work on SDG goals, specifically climate
• Partnerships with educational institutions, including MIT, on pedagogy, access to lab research and work opportunities
• Partnerships with corporations that have carbon neutral or sustainability missions
• Access to experts in agriculture, energy, construction, transportation
• Access to experts in building out global organizations specifically focused on equity, justice and inclusion

Given the above, here's a representative sample:

• UNFCCC, World Resources Institute, large environmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy
• MIT Sustainability School, Stanford & Columbia's climate school, MIT's Climate CoLab
• Experts who've worked on COP and on drafting SDG goals