Why we quit our corporate jobs and founded a startup — CarbonClick
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CarbonClick is founded by individuals, Jan Czaplicki and Paul Brady, who met in their previous roles working at a large corporate. They first crossed paths with Centrality when they joined the Centrality Blockworks Hackfest. CarbonClick’s pitch was selected as one of two winning solutions from the hackathon. The team then went on to enter the Centrality Accelerator programme to further their proposition and start developing on our platform.
How did you guys meet?
We struck up a friendship when working in the same team at Air New Zealand. It was only after chatting over a beer or two that we realised we both shared similar interests and had a burning desire to do something purposeful.
Tell us about your decision to quit your corporates jobs to do a startup?
It was a very difficult decision, and it still is! Working in a corporate is great in many ways especially the stability, certainty and focus — you do what’s in your job description! But that type of work normally only solves (relatively) small problems which are quite specific to the company you’re working for. We believe climate change is the biggest problem out there, which will touch the lives of billions of people. We felt a burning need to pitch in and be part of the solution. It’s incredibly challenging but also really rewarding.
You were developing a similar solution in your previous roles — when was the aha! moment when you realised you could do this yourself?
In our previous lives, Brady was a Solution Architect and Technical Team Lead while I was a Senior Business Analyst — as part of that role I questioned many things. When I was working on refreshing the carbon offset feature at Air New Zealand, I got deep insights into what it takes to build such a solution. It’s complex, involves a lot of moving parts and is outside of what the airline would normally spend their efforts on. In such a situation, it only makes sense to grab an “off the shelf” solution — but when I went looking for one, I noticed no such thing existed. That was my aha! moment!
What lead you to enter the Centrality hackathon?
We joined the hackathon to learn more about Centrality and see first-hand in which state the technology was. There’s also a story behind Centrality which we were more curious to learn more about — e.g. how will this “decentralised app store” work? How can blockchain solve the chicken-and-egg problem that most startups face?
What parts of the Centrality ecosystem will CarbonClick leverage?
We’ll connect to the PL^G blockchain and have a fair bit of data that will exist on their network. This will be under the hood and not visible to most people. We’ll also exist as a module to the dApps within the ecosystem. We’ll also leverage Sylo and SingleSource to onboard users and utilise CentraPay.
Why blockchain?
Firstly, we plan to enable the ability to ‘micro offset,’ for example to offset the carbon cost of your coffee which would be a couple of cents. Blockchain will enable us to perform these types of transactions in massive volumes for a fraction of the cost of current systems.
Secondly, one of the problems with carbon offsetting today is a general distrust in where contributions go, what proportion is taken by intermediaries and what proportion ends up going towards creating an impact. Blockchain can bring a level of transparency that’s not possible with current systems.
CarbonClick are currently raising capital to take their solution to market. To learn more about their project visit here.
To stay up-to-date on the progress of our technology, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.
