What do China, a sustainable furniture startup, and a blog called The Lazy Environmentalist have to do with Supercool?

This week, we're taking a short summer break from new interviews, but not before sharing the story behind the show.

In a special extended introduction, Josh Dorfman traces the unexpected path that shaped his philosophy on climate innovation—from working in bicycle-lock factories in China, to launching a modern sustainable furniture company, to the accidental creation of The Lazy Environmentalist. Along the way, he shares the question that has guided every company he's built for more than two decades: How do you get millions of people to adopt better technologies without asking them to become environmentalists first?

Then, we revisit one of Josh's favorite conversations with Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, whose remarkable entrepreneurial journey began with a simple but radical idea: that waste could become a valuable resource.

Show Notes

Guest: Tom Szaky, founder and CEO

Company: TerraCycle

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In 2019, Amazon made one of the biggest EV bets in business: 100,000 electric vehicles by 2030. Today, it is halfway there.

Amazon now has more than 50,000 EVs on the road globally, including 40,000 Rivian delivery vans. But getting to that number has required much more than replacing gas vans with electric ones. It has forced Amazon to rebuild delivery around the realities of electricity: where vehicles charge, how far they can go, how weather, hills, elevation, route density, and time of day affect range, and which vehicle actually fits each market.

That is why Amazon’s electric fleet now includes more than vans. It includes heavy-duty trucks moving containers out of ports, e-bikes delivering Whole Foods groceries in New York City, scooters in India, and other formats chosen for the way deliveries actually happen.
In this episode, Josh talks with Emily Barber and Tom Chempananical about the operating discipline behind Amazon’s push to remake delivery at global scale.

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If net zero is better, why isn’t it normal?

We have the technology and the know-how. Schools, hospitals, and skyscrapers are already being built that are beautiful, cheap to operate, and carbon-free.

And yet less than 1% are net zero.

Drew Shula is founder and CEO of Verdical Group, whose team has worked on green building projects for clients including Apple, Meta, and NASA. He also founded the Net Zero Conference, now in its thirteenth year, bringing together more than a thousand building professionals annually.

In this episode, Josh and Drew talk about Malibu High School, embodied carbon, California’s building policies, and the debate running beneath it all: what gets us to a net-zero world faster—better solutions or better rules?

Show Notes

Guest: Drew Shula, founder and CEO

Company: Verdical Group

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Some of the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world have almost no real visibility into one of their largest costs: power.

Contracts are complex. Prices swing. Grid capacity is scarce. Costs are rising. For some companies today, electricity can account for 30% to 40% of OpEx. For data centers, access to power determines whether a project begins operating or waits for years in a queue.
Verse gives large power buyers visibility into their electricity use, so they can see what they use, what they pay, and where they can reduce costs.

For data centers, Verse goes further. Its new product, Dispatch Intelligence, uses on-site batteries and software to make demand more flexible for the grid, helping projects begin operating faster without slowing down compute.

This week, Josh talks with Verse co-founder and CEO Seyed Madaeni, who has spent his career at the intersection of power markets, grid software, and large-scale batteries — from PG&E to Tesla to Fluence.

Today, Verse announced a $54 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Google Ventures, NVIDIA, and others.
Seyed also explains how the fastest, cheapest path to power is often the cleanest.

Show Notes

Guest: Seyed Madaeni, Co-founder & CEO

Company: Verse

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While companies across the construction industry were raising prices because of tariffs last year, Wythe Windows did the opposite: it lowered prices on high-performance, energy-efficient windows. Even more striking, Wythe manufactures them 20 miles from Midtown NYC.

Darren Macri came to construction after film school at NYU and built the first passive house in New Jersey. That project exposed the bottleneck: getting the right windows in the U.S. meant importing them from Europe through middlemen, and when orders arrived wrong or incomplete, there was no one local to call.

So he started making them in his hometown of Ramsey, New Jersey.

Today, Wythe ships coast to coast for projects ranging from high-end new construction to affordable housing retrofits in places like the South Bronx, where better windows mean an immediate quality-of-life upgrade: lower energy bills, quieter rooms, cleaner air, and greater comfort.

Now Darren is pushing the same idea further: from high-performance windows to high-performance retrofits for entire buildings.

Show Notes

Guest: Darren Macri, CO-CEO

Company: Wythe Windows

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Utility costs are among the largest expense categories in multifamily real estate; they have been rising in the double digits year over year.

The industry's attempt to answer has largely been technology. Smarter systems. AI-powered optimization. Devices that promise to cut costs by plugging into aging infrastructure.

Kyle Hendricks, VP and Head of Sustainability at Equity Residential, one of America's largest apartment owners, took a different approach. He tied energy performance to the annual compensation of every employee in the company — from the executive suite to the person turning over a unit between tenants — and turned a small corporate team into an army of part-time energy managers across 300 communities.

The first answer from leadership was a hard no. Then a maybe. Then show us the measurement. Where does this break down?

In this episode, Kyle explains how he built the case, why operating discipline outperforms silver bullet technology in a portfolio of old buildings, and what climate tech startups need to understand about multifamily real estate before they walk in the door.

Show Notes

Guest: Kyle Hendricks, VP and Head of Sustainability

Company: Equity Residential

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Geothermal should be an easy sell. It is quiet, efficient, comfortable, and cheap to run once installed. The problem has been the upfront cost of putting it in the ground.

Dandelion spent years proving residential geothermal could work house by house. Now CEO Dan Yates is taking it into new home construction, where whole developments can be built with geothermal from the start.

Dandelion’s partnership with Lennar in Colorado puts geothermal into 1,500 homes. Not luxury homes — starter homes, entry-level homes, homes for everyday Americans. At that scale, the cost to a builder can compete with conventional HVAC. In some cases, it can beat it.

New federal tax rules also opened the door to geothermal leasing, turning a large upfront expense into a small monthly payment for homebuyers.

In this episode, Dan explains why new home tours now start in the basement and how Dandelion is bringing geothermal into the mainstream.

Show Notes

Guest: Dan Yates, CEO

Company: Dandelion Energy

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Americans think they recycle. Mostly, we don’t. More than half of all recyclable materials never reach a recycling bin. They go straight into the garbage, where the waste industry has historically had little economic incentive — and limited technology — to recover them.

Matanya Horowitz founded AMP to build AI-powered robots that sort cans, bottles, and other valuable materials in recycling facilities, eventually deploying hundreds of robots across the country.

Now AMP is building AI-powered mixed waste facilities — the modern version of what the industry calls dirty MRFs — that sort valuable materials directly out of the garbage stream. Trash moves down a conveyor belt, drops into what Matanya calls a “garbage waterfall,” and air jets fire in milliseconds to knock milk jugs, aluminum cans, and other materials onto separate conveyors.

In this episode, Matanya explains why traditional recycling economics are broken, why the waste industry gave up on dirty MRFs decades ago, and how AMP’s full-scale facility in southeastern Virginia points to a different future: a recycling system that doesn’t require a recycling bin.

Show Notes

Guest: Matanya Horowitz, Founder & CTO

Company: AMP 

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Cow burps are one of climate’s strangest and most stubborn problems. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and cattle are responsible for about 30 percent of global methane emissions. For years, the basic answer has been: eat less beef and drink less milk.

Kathryn Polkoff, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Hoofprint Biome, thinks there is a better way. Hoofprint uses natural enzymes to reshape the cow’s rumen microbiome, cutting methane production while boosting dairy milk yield and beef cattle weight gain. No harsh chemical feed additives. Just a solution that helps farmers produce more with less methane.

In Supercool’s first live recording, Josh talks with Kathryn at Raleigh-Durham Startup Week’s inaugural Climate Tech Day about cow burps, commercializing agricultural climate tech, and why Hoofprint could not exist without AI. It is a climate story about biology, business, and turning wasted energy into value.

Show Notes

Guest: Kathryn Polkoff, PhD, co-founder and CEO

Company: Hoofprint Biome

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Construction has a hidden waste problem, and it starts long before anything reaches the job site.

For centuries, the master builder was the person who translated architectural vision into buildable reality. Today, modern construction is too complex for any one person to play that role. A commercial building can contain hundreds of thousands of components across electrical, mechanical, plumbing, structural, and fire protection systems. No one can see it all.

That turns construction into a zero-sum game. Trades compete for the same walls, ceilings, shafts, and risers. Some win. Some lose. And when those conflicts get discovered during construction instead of design, the result is rework, delays, wasted material, and systems that cost more than they should to build and operate.

In this episode, Josh talks with Frio Iorio, co-founder and CEO of Augmenta, about using AI to bring constructability to the start of design: turning architectural models, engineering requirements, and project constraints into 3D designs that show what can actually be built before construction begins.

The result: less material waste, fewer expensive mistakes, and buildings designed to use less energy for decades.

Show Notes

Guest: Francesco Iorio

Company: Augmenta

Documentary (referenced): Manufactured Landscapes

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