Balancing Purpose & Business
We have years, not decades, to reverse global warming, which requires climate solutions that can be quickly implemented at a large scale. A strong, impact-first business model will help us achieve this.
When we started Tero, we distilled our mission around one guiding question:
This has guided every decision at Tero ever since. We have designed, built, and optimized for just that — whether it’s our product, marketing, or business model.
It’s also why we decided to launch Tero as a commercial company. The decision wasn’t clear from the beginning, and we spent months evaluating different options. At first, setting it up as a nonprofit seemed like the intuitive choice, but with years of experience in both NGOs and businesses, we knew that the latter would be much better positioned to achieve our goal.
Incorporating as a commercial company gives us the freedom to take entrepreneurial risks, fail fast, and innovate quickly. It also provides us access to the growth capital needed to scale from hundreds to millions, and it allows us to attract the world’s best talent to solve the world’s biggest problem.
The key to creating a regenerative business is to align incentives. We wanted to ensure from day one that if Tero ever succeeded, not only would the planet be better for it, but it would stand to gain more than anyone else. The truest way to do that is through profit sharing, as a company's end goal or "bottom line" is how much profit it can generate. So we made the decision to choose who profits.
That means that our main stakeholder is the environment, not our investors. With this, we also set an example for other businesses to rethink from the ground up the true impact of their work and to stop greenwashing. We are proud of the company we are building and inspired by the great support and feedback from the community that has helped us get here. The trust you put in us is humbling and pushes us every day to get better as we continue to build a free and easy way to reverse climate change.