Building Green Businesses

So I want to talk about how you got started sort of caring so much about climate.

So in 1996, you were working in China in a bike lock factory.

Is this right? Correct.

And in Nanjing.

And you realized that the country was heading very quickly toward a billion cars.

So what did that set in motion for you?

Well, it set in motion a journey to try to figure out what that meant, what that would mean for me personally.

I was in China because I saw 30 years ago, I felt that China was developing so rapidly, was going to become a challenger to the United States.

I was thinking about a career in diplomacy and thinking about the 21st century and America would need Americans who understood China and to help ensure peaceful coexistence and all that stuff.

And so that's why I was there.

I was teaching English on a university.

I got a part-time job working at a bicycle lock factory for a company called Kryptonite.

And yeah, over that experience, over a couple of years, just seeing all the highways, tunnels, bridges coming in, all that infrastructure and being so focused on trying to sell bike locks and a billion people had bikes, it just...

it did occur to me like, wow, there's actually going to be a billion cars here.

And my first thought was, where's all the oil going to come from? I wrote my senior thesis on China's secret weapon sales to the Middle East, arguing that they were trying to gain favor with oil countries.

But I didn't know what to do.

So it honestly, it took me five or six years to come back to the States.

I Went to business school.

I went through the dot-com boom and bust.

I wrote screenplays in LA for a little bit.

I went into a PhD program at GW in political science, thinking about China and the environment and politics.

And ultimately, it was about five or six years of trying on some different hats to then come to the conclusion of saying, you know what? I live in a consumer-driven culture.

Two-thirds of our economy runs on consumption.

I don't really want to keep thinking about this.

I just want to go take action.