Jane Thompson

The best career advice I've ever received is to leave when you stop learning. A lot of jobs can become stagnant where you're doing the same thing every week, making slides, running the same queries, and repeating the same analyses. I think because I've had so many different jobs and moved around a lot, I've picked up a lot of new skills and learned about different industries. There's stigma behind leaving a job too soon, and people worry about resume gaps, but I've found that's never really been the case for me. As long as you have a clear reason for why you want to leave and you're interested in the company you're interviewing with, I don't think the resume gap is as important as people think it is. So I would say don't worry about that. Go do what you want to do, make sure you're learning, and just chase afterwards.

I would say build out your network and talk to people. When I started, I didn't know anyone or anything, and I would browse LinkedIn and find companies that I thought looked cool, then reach out to people. The way I started working with Risk was I literally just emailed the CEO of the company when it was 9 people and they had no job openings on their website. I said this company seems cool, I'd love to get involved, let me know if anything changes or if there would be anything part-time. He called me back and said they didn't have money but had a lot of work. I was fortunate because I had a full-time job and some free time, so I started working for free on random projects with them. Eventually they started paying me as a contractor, then hired me full-time. My advice would be talk to as many people as possible, join Slack groups and communities in the field like Women in Climate Tech and DER Task Force. If you see a company that looks cool, don't be afraid to reach out if you don't see an opening that exactly matches. And this might be bad advice, but don't be afraid to volunteer your time for free. The more you can invest into your learning and development early in your career, it'll pay dividends later.

One of the main challenges in the carbon credit market is the measurement and reporting and verification of actual carbon credits. For example, if we help restore desert land and trees grow, we might say we've sequestered a million tons of carbon and can sell those credits. But a lot of people question the methodology, like did you actually sequester that much carbon? What if someone clear-cuts the trees and burns the wood, then all that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere. It's all estimations, none of the numbers are exact, it's all just our best guess. There are industry standards for reporting and third-party auditors who validate the methodology, but there are a lot of problems in the carbon credit market. Over the past few years, credits have been exposed as not real, like people saying they're protecting rainforests from being cut down when those forests were never going to be cut down anyway. That challenge extends more broadly to the climate tech space in general. There's a lot of political contentiousness around the topic, which makes it difficult for energy companies to approach potential customers in parts of the world where climate change is not top of mind. A lot of energy startups have issues with their business models because they can't position themselves as forces of good for the Green Tech Initiative. When they approach customers in the south of the US or somewhere where people don't care as much about climate change, they can't even get on the phone with prospective clients. So these green tech companies have to position themselves more as this is how we'll help you save money, it doesn't matter about the climate, in order for their businesses to sustain themselves.

I think kindness is a big one. Whether we're at work or in our personal lives, kindness is one of those things that you can always give to other people. You can give it to your coworkers, you can give it to the people at the coffee shop, just leaving the world in a better place than you found it, like taking trash up off the street or something. I think that's one of the most important ones. Another one is play. I feel like there's lots of important things and lots of things to worry about, but I think our lives are short, so it's important to also make time to play and laugh and have fun and spend time with the people that you love. So I think kindness and play are two big ones for me, for sure.