Assessing carbon offsets; rating and new market

#Intangible 13/05/2021

London-based Sylvera has raised $7.8 million from powerful investment funds to develop a methodology to assess carbon offsets and bring transparency to the entire market.

This is of great interest to me because one of my clients is a startup that creates entire plant ecosystems through big data and drones (dropping seeds) and gives companies the possibility to offset excess carbon with official carbon offsets.

I think it’s great to be able to value these kinds of intangible assets, improve market transparency and improve the environment as well.

The way this company is going to develop the methodology is through geospatial data, machine learning and proprietary climate data. They use satellite imagery, run it through a bunch of algorithms that analyse what’s going on in the imagery, and then generate a standardised valuation of the project under the microscope.

The funding for this new round is led by Indexa Venture, and existing investors include Seedcamp, Speedinvest and Revent.

App overload, poorer quality of work

#Intangible 27/10/2021

Apps came to allow all kinds of companies and freelancers to work more efficiently and economically; we can build a tech stack adjusted to almost any budget and also over time a whole series of companies have emerged that, through plugins or simple connections for the user, allow us to build the entire technological «infrastructure», whatever our size and complexity.

But a problem has arisen, a big problem. Switching from one app to another in our daily work causes our concentration to be constantly interrupted and consequently our productivity and the quality of our work because our mental energy is diluted.

One thing I have noticed over the last few years is that a large percentage of these apps are unnecessary. I give an example in the financial area; practically everything can be done in Excel and a good accounting program, but now we have an app to calculate the cap table, another one to calculate cash flows, another one to visualize, an another one to make documents, another one to make documents ….. not to mention the dozens of channels for constant communication. All of this can be done in a single program, a basic excel, but of course, it requires more conscious (and manual) work on our side.

We need to reflect on this issue because we are in the attention economy; those who have the discipline and method to cut through the noise and work with the essence are the ones who will have a great competitive advantage over the rest of the professionals and the companies to which they belong.

Image via The Hustle