Tech For Good feat. Glad

We recently caught up with James McQuarrie, co-founder of Glad, a company tackling climate change head-on. Glad’s mission is to accelerate the return to safe levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide by helping businesses take direct, impactful climate action. 

In this interview, James shares how Glad was born, the challenges of building a purpose-driven tech product, and why more tech professionals are seeking roles that create positive change. 

Can you please introduce yourself, what your business does and what makes your business and offering unique and a force for good?

Hi, I’m James, one of the founders of Glad.

At Glad we believe climate change is the biggest challenge of our time, and while more and more people and businesses want to do something to tackle it, we’re collectively still not doing enough to reverse the causes.

To tackle climate change we need to do two things;

1. reduce the pollution we emit today (and going forward)
2. remove the legacy pollution that is already up in our atmosphere

1988 was the last time there was a safe level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and we’ve been steadily pumping more and more up there year on year ever since.

Glad’s mission is to accelerate the return to safe levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, by making it easy and affordable for businesses to take positive climate action and have meaningful impact.

The Glad Employee Pollution Removal Plan is our first step to achieving this. It’s a simple way for companies to remove more than a tonne of legacy pollution per employee each year, from as little as £1 per day per employee.

What makes Glad different to other solutions is twofold;

1. Firstly our focus on removing legacy pollution
2. Secondly our obsession with making it as simple and as easy as possible to get started and have impact.

Most companies within the world of climate focus on measuring, quantifying and then reducing or offsetting current emissions, which is great, and we encourage everyone to do this. But to truly tackle climate change we need to also clean up the mess we’ve collectively been making for hundreds of years. And we need to do it now.

Glad’s approach pools contributions from our customers and uses them to buy carbon removal from a mix of suppliers. This increases buying power, spreads the risk and makes sure the impact is real. In return, businesses and their teams get Glad Impact Records to track how much impact they have over time, along with a badge they can display online to show the world their contributions.

And we’re not stopping there! We’re also working on the Glad Card; a business payment card where 1% of all spending goes into pollution removal. It’s another way for businesses to increase their impact with minimal effort.

Can you share the story behind the origin of your business and Service /Product?

Ben, my co-founder, and I are long time collaborators, having worked together on and off for over 15 years. We’ve worked as consultants on client projects and at a number of startups together. Post pandemic, while working on separate projects, we each started to wonder how we might use our experience and skills to work on something that would have a positive impact on the world.

Having recently worked in a large FinTech Ben came up with the idea for the Glad payment card. And asked me to talk him out of the idea. I did the opposite and here we are!

To test our thinking and learn more about the problem we spoke with a wide range of business leaders who all wanted to do the right thing but felt overwhelmed and were struggling to know where to start.

That’s why we are bring Glad to life; to make it easy for them to make a genuine impact without overcomplicating things. We encourage businesses to measure and reduce their carbon footprint and offset unavoidable emissions, but we also give them a straightforward way to clean up the legacy emissions that are already out there.

Can you share some tech challenges or barriers you had to overcome to create a Product / Service offering with potential, whilst remaining ‘for good’?

On the tech front, the real challenge has been about deciding what our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) should look like and how lean we can be with our resources. We’ve had to be smart about where we put our time and effort to make sure we deliver maximum impact.

We take a systems thinking approach to everything we do, meaning we look at how each decision affects our ability to make a difference as a whole. Every decision we make is guided by whether it maximises positive impact.

Why do you think is it a growing trend for tech professionals to seek out opportunities to work in purpose-driven businesses?

We’ve noticed more tech professionals are moving towards roles where they feel they can make a positive difference. Over the last couple of decades, tech has brought a lot of great benefits, but it’s also led to overconsumption. As the costs of this growth become clearer, more people are starting to question their role in it and want to work on something that matters.

Research also tells us that younger people coming into the workforce have a more personal connection to issues like climate change. They want to know that their employer is doing something good for the future.

For me personally, finding a way to use my experience, help tackle a huge issue and enjoy the work I do is important and with Glad we’re created something that ticks all three boxes.

What has been the key thing you’ve learned about ‘tech for good’ and your target audience specifically?

After speaking with a lot of business leaders, one thing is clear; they all *want* to do the right thing but often feel lost in the process. Many are already making efforts to measure their carbon footprints and switch to greener suppliers, but there’s still a sense of not knowing how much impact they’re actually making.

We’re seeing interest from all sorts of companies – from small ethical brands to bigger businesses who realise they need to step up.

The drivers for getting involved with tech for good vary. Some are all about doing what’s right for the planet, some are being lobbied by their employees, while others see the brand value or want to stay ahead of legislation. Whatever their reasons, we’re here to help them make a positive impact.