Stepping off the ride

Ten years ago this fall, a small group of us started meeting with an idea: to build not just a new company, but a new kind of company — one that helped people both make money and make a difference. This past decade of building Aspiration has been a roller coaster of ups and downs, twists and turns. Today, that ride as Aspiration’s leader comes to an end for me, but though my head’s a little dizzy and my legs a bit wobbly, I hop off with pride knowing that we have done what we set out to do.

Aspiration has created the category of Sustainability as a Service — building climate crisis-fighting action into what people and businesses do every day to make it easy and meaningful at the same time.

Just since 2015, we’ve launched:

• The first bank account at scale to ensure customers’ deposits are not used to finance oil and gas projects. By our calculations, the average person would have a bigger climate impact by moving their deposits from a big bank to Aspiration than by switching from a traditional car to an electric vehicle
• The first sustainable investment fund to bring world class fossil fuel-free, ESG strategies to everyday investors
• The first sustainability score built into people’s daily purchases so that they are armed to be climate conscious consumers
• The first credit card built to fight the climate crisis by offsetting the average person’s entire carbon footprint just by using it once a day

Today, Aspiration has moved far beyond our beginnings in financial services and now offers all kinds of ways to help people and businesses get to climate zero or, even better, climate positive.

In fact, I’d venture to say that few, if any, companies in the last few years have had a larger positive climate impact than Aspiration:

• The cumulative climate impact of the carbon removal and avoidance from Aspiration products and services is estimated to be the equivalent of taking every car in New York State off the streets for a year. This year alone, the impact is estimated to be the same as removing every car in Arizona from the roads.
• We’ve processed $19 billion in fossil fuel free banking transactions from our more than 7 million members
• Our Aspiration community has funded the planting of over 125 million trees around the world in the past year and a half. That’s a quarter of a million trees a day — the equivalent of planting as many trees as there are in NYC’s Central Park every two hours. And we’re making sure those trees don’t just get planted, but grow
• We’ve built up one of the largest set of high quality carbon removal project credits that meet our standard for dependable and permanent climate impact; that strengthen, not harm, biodiversity; and that deal in local communities on the success of these carbon removal projects so that the work of fighting the climate crisis does not exacerbate inequalities but instead lifts the boats of the people around the world who are on the front lines of the work to save our planet. Aspiration has already created 1.35 million hours of work at fair wages in the developing world

And not only have we shown that people can make money and make a difference, we’ve also shown that companies can do that too. Aspiration’s revenue run rate has grown nearly four times over in the past year, and we’ve done that while being named to the “Best for the World” list of the top five percent of B Corporations five times in a row.

Words cannot express my gratitude to everyone who has believed in Aspiration and been a part of this journey: my family for sacrifices too many to count over these ten years, our Aspiration partners and investors, the amazing members of our A-Team who gave the most precious gift of time to our Mission|Driven company, and — as a customer-centered business — thanks most of all to the nearly 8 million members and many dozens of businesses who have trusted us and given us a chance to serve them.

Though my time as CEO has come to an end, I have faith that Aspiration’s story is just beginning and that it will continue to grow and thrive in its vital work. Most of all, I hope other entrepreneurs will look to what our team has done as an example and set out on their own thrilling, sometimes stomach-churning, roller coaster rides. I can’t wait to see all they accomplish in both doing well and doing good.