B2B Software meets Sustainability
The past year has been a rollercoaster (to say the least), and I recently had my 26th birthday. Over the summer, I moved to Colorado and saw firsthand what climate change could do to a landscape and a community. The forest fires here set a handful of state records and will be back in the summer of 2021. If you’ve been watching the news, reading any recent reports or predictions of the climate, one thing mutually agreed upon by everyone. The clock is slowly ticking, and it is only a matter of time until our carbon-related damage to the environment is irreversible.
So I’m starting a blog. I recently read Ben Horowitz’s new book What You Do is Who You are. His main argument is that the right answers to the Hard questions in business and life depend on the thousands of actions taken by a group or an individual. One quote: “who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in a company-wide meeting. Its not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do” ran especially true with me. Horowitz’s book is about companies’ culture, but it caused me to reflect on my personal values a bit, as I think we all have recently. The blog will be an excellent vector to discuss, promote and highlight solutions to climate change.
How will I cut through the noise with so many high-quality blogs and podcasts out there now? This blog will be all about B2B enterprise software that helps other businesses and institutions form-tackle climate change. I don’t think this exists yet. Why software? A few reasons.
First, as most people know, software can be quickly developed, released, consumed, and improved. There are many different ideas and entrepreneurs dreaming up solutions to this array of problems; I think the speed at which the software market moves will bode well to find climate change solutions. This will also be immensely entertaining. So much of mainstream climate change technology is hardware-focused, I’d like to explore a product set that gets less media exposure. This blog will follow a market where networks, platforms, and protocols allow organizations to manage energy consumption and carbon output efficiently.
Second, software has notoriously high growth potential. Software generally has high-margins, generally strong demand, hyper-scale go-to-market ability, is a target market for venture capitalists, and also causes legacy companies to pivot. For example, Honeywell tries to sell more software to lift profit margins and curb reliance on the standard business cycle. The promise of recurring revenue and transformation of large industrial companies are frequent strategic imperatives carried by rising support from the executive level.
Lastly, the software industry is the nexus where humanity decides to try things that are bold and daring. With an increase in investment in domain-specific software applications rather than universal tools, there is no end to understanding the wide range of value that software can provide civilization in the realm of sustainability. Hardware is limited by physics; software is only bound by the limits of human thought.
Software is just a program and operating information used by a computer. This is also not to say that hardware and software are not often inexorably linked. Organizations and businesses use software to analyze, connect, joke, and create. I don’t know where this blog will go, but I’m looking forward to discussing B2B software as it relates to sustainability!
C
