Supercool

Every climate company that scales knows the secret: they don’t sell climate. In this solo episode of Supercool, host Josh Dorfman shares one of the clearest lessons from nearly two years of conversations with founders, CEOs, operators, and investors across the low-carbon economy: the companies that break through do not lead with technical specs or climate mission. Their messaging is built around concrete customer benefits. Josh shows what that looks like in practice, with examples from companies scaling in mobility, home electrification, the built environment, and renewable energy. Time and again, the same pattern emerges. The climate companies that win never ask customers to sacrifice. They offer something immediate and better: lower costs, better performance, more control, and peace of mind. Carbon reductions are built in.

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If the circular economy is ever going to become just “the economy,” it will need infrastructure. In this episode, Josh talks with Rich Amsinger, co-founder of Manymoons and The Many Company, about building it. The conversation traces the company’s evolution from Borobabi, which began with Rich and Carolyn Butler trying to keep their daughter’s outgrown clothes in use, to Manymoons, what the company calls America’s first circular retailer, and now ManyCo, the AI-, logistics-, and demand-powered engine behind it all. Rich explains why returns, overstock, and excess inventory aren’t side issues in retail but a massive opportunity. He also makes the case that circularity requires more than software. It requires actually selling the stuff—while protecting the brand, recovering more value, and keeping better products in use longer.

Show Notes

Guest: Rich Amsinger, Co-Founder

Companies: Manymoons and ManyCo

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Most architects don't tell you your home could be nearly silent, filter every breath of air, and run almost without heat. Not because it's impossible. Because they don't know how to build it.

Michael Ingui does. For more than a decade, his firm has built Passive Houses across New York City — landmarked townhouses, gut renovations, apartments with swimming pools and floor-to-ceiling glass. His clients get quieter rooms, cleaner air, and heating and cooling bills 80 to 90 percent below a conventional home. For the life of the building.

His opening question to clients isn't about energy or carbon. It's whether they'd like a home free of bugs. Whether they'd like to stop hearing the street.

Michael is also co-founder of the Passive House Accelerator, a catalyst for zero carbon building that shares innovation and thought leadership across Passive House design and construction, and Source 2050, a marketplace for vetted high-performance building materials.
For Michael, the goal is straightforward: get everyone building this way, as fast as possible. The high-performance, zero-carbon future is counting on it.

Show Notes

Guest: Michael Ingui, Partner

Company: Ingui Architecture

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Nobody wants to be policed. Not even sustainability advocates.

Charlie Sellars has spent six years as a Director of Sustainability at Microsoft. He's the author of What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable Living. His TEDx talk is titled "Make Sustainability Fun Again." His argument: the movement has spent too long trying to be right at the expense of being effective. And that mistake is costing us.

But making sustainability fun is only half the equation. The other half is knowing where to aim. And that means lifecycle analysis — the ability to measure the true environmental cost of anything from cradle to grave.

Here's what that reveals: 80 to 90 percent of a device's lifetime emissions — like the one you're reading now and listening with — occur before you ever turn it on. Which means the single most impactful thing you can do with the phone you're holding right now has nothing to do with how you use it.

It's how long you keep it.

Show Notes:

Guest: Charlie Sellars, Award-Winning Author and Microsoft Sustainability Director

Book: What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable Living

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The largest geothermal residential building in New York City just opened in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 834 apartments. 320 boreholes drilled hundreds of feet underground — enough to heat and cool every unit in the building. Even the rooftop pool.

Geosource Energy drilled it. This conversation is about how they did it, and what it takes to build geoexchange systems at scale in dense cities, where there's already a city's worth of infrastructure below: water, gas, electric, telecom, subways, and foundations.

Geoexchange is simple to explain and hard to execute. No combustion. No fuel. Fully electric. The physics are straightforward. The delivery is not.

Building owners choose geoexchange for the operating savings. And for every dollar saved at the building level, the grid saves eight or nine — because geoexchange cuts peak demand when electricity is most expensive and most scarce.

That's a true decarbonization driver. And why cities from Toronto to Boston to New York are leaning in with more to follow.
Geosource has completed more than 400 projects. The infrastructure they install is designed to outlast the buildings it serves. Stan calls it 500-year pipe. He's seen a building come down and the borefield stay put, ready for the next one.

Show Notes:

Guest: Stanley Reitsma, CEO

Company: Geosource Energy

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People assume farmers are conservative by nature. Cautious. Set in their ways.

Ryan Jones, VP of Sustainability at Indigo Ag, has a different read: farmers aren’t risk-averse. They’re risk-saturated.

Consider factors like weather, debt, input costs, labor, and fluctuating commodity prices. One bad season can set a farmer back years. So when someone shows up and says, “Change how you farm,” the first question any farmer asks is: who’s carrying the risk?

That’s the problem Indigo was built to solve. Pay farmers to adopt regenerative practices. Quantify the outcomes. Connect them to buyers through carbon markets or corporate supply chains. Today, Indigo operates in 15 countries and manages a portfolio spanning 20 million acres, delivering over a megaton of greenhouse gas reductions/removals and conserving nearly 100 billion gallons of water—and it recently announced a 12-year offtake agreement with Microsoft for 2.85 million tons of carbon removal credits.

But this conversation is about more than keeping carbon in the soil. It’s also about water. In the Mid-South rice belt, companies face an existential sourcing risk and farmers face an existential livelihood risk. And with a shared aquifer, one farmer conserving water doesn’t move the needle if everyone else keeps pumping.

The only way through is everyone moving together. And Indigo’s bet is that you get there by making the most practical thing the most profitable thing—fast enough to matter.

Show Notes

Guest: Ryan Jones, Vice President of Sustainability

Company: Indigo Ag

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Forty-five million Americans live in apartments. Almost none have solar—not because the technology doesn't work, but because building owners pay for installation while tenants get the savings. It's the split incentive conundrum holding the sector back.

Owen Barrett saw this problem when he started investing in apartment buildings. Nobody in multifamily was thinking about energy—just paint colors and new countertops. He tried consulting. Nobody listened. So he raised capital, bought buildings, and installed solar himself.

The breakthrough: software that tracks each tenant's solar usage and bills them for it. Owners earn revenue. Tenants save money.

That became Shine, a company that installs solar on apartment buildings and handles everything from design to maintenance.

Shine went from 100 units in 2024 to 3,000 in 2025, projecting 20,000 in 2026. They're working with two of the five largest apartment owners in America.

Owen and Josh discuss why execution beats innovation, how rising electricity prices make subsidies irrelevant, and why doing what you promise became a competitive advantage.

Show Notes

Guest: Owen Barrett, CEO

Company: Shine

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In 2019, Will Wiseman watched 100,000 people march through Barcelona for the global climate strikes. He felt hope. Then the obvious truth: everyone was going home, and nothing would change. So, he built Climatize, an SEC-registered investment platform that allows anyone to invest as little as $10 in clean energy projects across the United States.

Climatize specializes in projects ranging from $250,000 to $5 million, which are traditionally too small for institutional lenders to fund. The company's proprietary AI tools compress due diligence from weeks to minutes. Some projects raise hundreds of thousands of dollars within 24 hours.

The crowdfunding platform's progress to date: $14 million deployed across 33 clean energy projects—solar, battery storage, EV charging, and energy efficiency—in 14 states.

Will and Josh discuss why finance-first messaging outperforms climate-first messaging, how AI has made small deals viable, and why speed to finance has become Climatize's competitive moat.

Show Notes

Guest: Will Wiseman, Co-Founder & CEO

Company: Climatize

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Kunal Girotra was Head of Tesla Energy before leaving in 2020 to found Lunar Energy. Then he went silent. Over two years, he raised $300 million, built a 250-person team, and developed home battery systems that blend sleek design with state-of-the-art technology. Lunar emerged from stealth in 2022 with a mission to deliver endless, affordable clean energy.

What differentiates Lunar: it's both a hardware and software company. The battery and AI are designed and integrated as a single system. The software learns each home's unique energy fingerprint, deciding when to charge from the grid at low rates, when to run on battery, and when to sell power back at premium prices.

The results: customers earn an average of $464 annually through Virtual Power Plant programs and $338 through optimization—over $800 in total, with seamless backup power.

Lunar's GridShare platform now manages 650 megawatts of distributed energy for utilities across multiple continents. This morning, the company announced $232 million in new funding to expand nationwide.

Show Notes:

Guest: Kunal Girotra, Founder & CEO

Company: Lunar Energy

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Data centers have always pursued energy efficiency through better hardware—smarter chillers, advanced cooling systems. But there's a ceiling. You can only make hardware so efficient.

Seven years ago, Jasper de Vries discovered the butterfly effect in data centers—something on a roof rippling through 300 billion sensor readings down to valves in server rooms. His company, Lucend, ingests that sensor data to generate operator recommendations. One facility cut power usage by 40% in a year, saving $4.3 million.

Yet here's what most of us miss about AI's big energy problem: we focus on operational energy use while Scope 3 emissions—the embodied carbon from manufacturing hardware—creates massive impact, so much so that Microsoft won't hit its 2030 climate targets because of its data center growth plans. With JP Morgan projecting $5 trillion in AI infrastructure buildouts by 2030, the need to bring embodied carbon under control is urgent.

Lucend's software addresses both challenges: it slashes operational energy while extending hardware life through predictive maintenance, reducing the physical wear that forces early replacement. Its technology is now deployed across over 50 facilities globally.

Show Notes

Guest: Jasper de Vries

Company: Lucend

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