Launch HN: Wren (YC S19) – Offset Your Carbon Footprint
Here is part of what I told Paul Graham after he tweeted you last week:<p>&quot;How about instead of directing people to pay a middle man to take 20% off the top to pay others to plant trees&quot; which, correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, is exactly what you are doing, while some of may be going to non-tree planting activities - the most effective thing you can do with that money right now, unless you are sitting on a miraculous new technology, is to pay people to actively plant new trees and&#x2F;or protect existing forest.<p>Per your website for those that haven&#x27;t looked<p>&gt;Wren takes 20% of each subscription and puts it toward growing the company.<p>Also like I told Paul, and Sam Altman,<p>&quot;Planting trees isn&#x27;t even a bandaid, it&#x27;s like cutting your arm off and then gently blowing in the gaping wound. To offset our current CO2 production you need to add more than 31 million square miles, nearly 16% of the earth&#x27;s land, of new forest assuming a healthy density of 40-60 trees per acre.&quot;<p>That figure above is actually really conservative. Add to that the fact we&#x27;re losing forest at an estimated 28,125 square miles annually... do you realize how many customers you&#x27;ll have to get to even combat 28,125 square miles annually? The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre, that means you&#x27;re going to need to plant a billion plus trees a year to even hope to combat current forest loss, a BILLION trees... and I&#x27;m not talking twigs, I&#x27;m talking 10ft+ trees, in healthy soil, with healthy fungal networks (the fungi that work in symbiosis with trees aid considerably in the carbon sequestration and overall tree health).<p>Seriously, do the math yourselves and then try and justify your business model. Not to me, but to each other.<p>I think you need to cease operations immediately, I think you need to do a lot more math, and then I think you need to come back with a strategy to help people personally minimize their carbon impact. You&#x27;re selling people a fantasy, you&#x27;re selling them nothing more than an uniformed &quot;I&#x27;m helping save the world&quot; feeling because they joined a subscription service while you take 20% off the top to hire more employees.<p>I honestly have no idea whatsoever why YC selected your company and chose to fund it, other than the 20% off the top of every subscription and perhaps banking on the fact that people will feel guilty about climate change and happily fork over money on a subscription model.