The Origin Story
Why we started Earth.
Why did we start Earth?
This is the question we get asked the most often, usually followed by: “what is Earth?” The honest answer (to both) is that Earth is the culmination of our combined and individual experiences, self-reflections, ideologies – and the problems we think, once solved, will have the greatest impact in healing our planet.
On the surface, we know it’s a little funny that two guys who made their name first building and selling enterprise fintech software and then launching a crypto network are now, twenty years later, so passionate about the impact space. Perhaps it’s cliche, but all the reasons why Earth exists today are scattered throughout these chapters in our past. Little moments that crystallized into bigger ones – building and selling companies together, moving to the US (and then moving back), moments of excitement, moments of disillusionment.
To fully understand what we’re trying to achieve through Earth, we have to revisit some of these chapters. So humor us for a moment and travel back in time with us, twenty years ago to when the first domino in our story fell: the day we started working together in SF.
Chapter 1: Always Too Early
In 2005, I moved from Frankfurt to SF to set up a subsidiary for my first startup, Ebydos, an accounts payable software. At the time, the internet was just starting to shrug off the bad reputation the dot-com bubble had stained it with and was shifting back into something that was cool and fashionable again.
Naturally, this meant SF was also cool and fashionable again. It became the place to be for anyone who wanted to build things or be associated with building things – founders, operators, investors, indie hackers. So Philip, who at the time was working in our Frankfurt office, made the decision to uproot his life, shift to the other side of the world, and join us in SF to launch our US operations.
The week he arrived, we decided to sell the company.
Not quite what either of us had planned. Especially Philip, who by his own admission would not have stepped foot on that plane if he knew Ebydos would be sold so quickly. Regardless, we both stayed in SF and joined the acquiring company. It wasn’t a long-term passion for either of us, but by this point we’d developed a strong bond based on mutual admiration and respect. I particularly admired Philip for taking the risk of moving to SF, and both of us felt very strongly that, no matter what, we wanted to continue working together.
Over the next three years, while I worked towards my earn out (and green card) and while Philip soaked up all that SF had to offer, we explored different ideas in the consumer space – because we, too, wanted to be cool and fashionable, and because Facebook had ushered in this new era of social networking around the same time the iPhone was announced in January 2007.
To cut a long story short, none of the ideas we explored were as good as Zuck’s and our naivety meant we kept creating things people didn't need (yet). Like in 2007, when we started a company called Snappr that generated QR codes linked to mobile websites. Sounds cool, you might think, except no one at the time knew what a QR code was and the only phones that could read them were in Japan. If we had done literally any research, we would’ve realized it was a terrible idea. (The tech we built was good though and got acquired later on).
After a few failed experiments like this, we decided to go back to the drawing board. We first asked ourselves what we were good at. The answer was fintech enterprise software. Then we asked ourselves what in this space was a problem we knew we could solve.
And that is how our second company, Taulia, was born.
Chapter 2: Building (and Leaving) Taulia
Taulia was a natural extension of what we built at Ebydos.
At Ebydos, we were connecting companies with suppliers by digitizing invoices. We knew the next step would be to connect all of these companies and build a B2B network that let them exchange this information electronically. Although at the beginning we had no idea what this would look like, Taulia ended up being a supplier finance solution that connected large buying organizations and their suppliers so they could access liquidity faster without having to wait out payment terms.
How this works in practice: a buyer enters into an agreement with a supply chain finance provider, like a bank or financial institution, and then invites its network of suppliers to join the program. From there, suppliers can request early payment on their invoices from the finance provider.
One of our ad campaigns for Taulia: the man who always pays on time.
Jumping back into enterprise was a lot of fun, in part because, unlike consumer, it was what we knew. We’d spent so much time at Ebydos building and selling to enterprise customers that it came more naturally to us than closing small or medium-sized businesses – and certainly easier than raising money from VCs.
Although SF by that time was the venture capital of the world (no pun intended), we weren’t a part of that ecosystem. We were just two Germans who happened to sell a software company, and this, by itself, wasn't enough to warrant term sheets being waved at us. After all, in SF every second or third person sitting in Starbucks has also sold a software company. So for a year and a half, we bootstrapped Taulia and went through the grind of pitching to a bunch of weird grifting angel groups – the kinds where you walk in, the vibe is a little off, there’s 20 guys sitting in a row, and as soon as you begin to pitch, 10 of them start falling asleep.
And, in typical VC fashion, no one took a chance on us – until we had our first customer, and the name of that customer was Pfizer.
We started with a tiny contract with Pfizer; a few thousand dollars for a one-time payment that, over the years, expanded into a large, large ARR contract. Within a few weeks of signing Pfizer, we had Coca-Cola, Warner Brothers, and John Deere signed, too.
Investors started to pay attention. And, as always with these things, luck pushed us over the line. Right around the time we were closing our round in 2009, AngelList launched their institutional product. To this day, we’re not exactly sure where the connection came from, but our co-founder Bertram somehow knew Naval Ravikant, and, as fate would have it, Taulia ended up being the first featured institutional investment on AngelList. As soon as that happened, we got a stream of inbound from brand-name VCs and were able to close our first round — still giving away way too much of the company. You live, you learn.
Looking back, we didn’t know the diamond we were sitting on with Taulia. We were blissfully ignorant to how rare it was to sign Pfizer, Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers as first customers, and there were many times when we were ahead of the curve, being ignorant to how our stubbornness (one could call it “vision”) helped us. For example, we got a lot of slack from corporates for refusing to host on our customers’ servers. When word got out that we were running in Amazon’s cloud, our competitors had a field day using it against us.
“Hey, you can’t trust these German guys. They’re going to put your stuff in the cloud. Who does that?!” If only they knew about SaaS.
In between starting and leaving Taulia, many things happened. Building a company is a multi-decade effort (more on this another time), and as Taulia grew, Philip and I had to grow with it. The pace became different and our roles changed. Philip, for example, was not actively involved in building the product as much as he was managing a team that did, and our sales cycle lengthened dramatically. It took a few failed attempts for us to hire senior sales leadership, but when we got it right, we found our future CEO.
As the years went on, we gradually shifted into roles that were more and more removed from the day-to-day & minute-to-minute we knew from the early days. Philip took a role leading an innovation research group within the company, and I went from CPO to Chief Strategy Officer. Although it was great to see how we grew in each of the new positions we were in, by the time Taulia had grown to 200 employees in 2016, Philip and I knew we couldn’t provide the same value that we provided in the beginning. Taulia was no longer a small family made up of our best friends. It was just a company. And one that could run without us.
So, we both moved back to Europe.
Chapter 3: A Break, Centrifuge, and Another Break
After Taulia, I moved to Spain to take a hardcore break from tech. I ordered some wood on Amazon with the hopes of learning how to do some serious woodwork and maybe even becoming a carpenter. (That wood is still sitting untouched in my garage today).
While I was busy preparing to embark on my great carpentry career, Philip was undergoing deeper self-reflections on what mattered to him. After Taulia, did he want to build financial software that helped the largest corporates make more money? He began to think about what larger systems he was a part of, and what leverage he had to transform these systems into something more impactful, more meaningful.
Shortly after, as always seems to be the case with us, gravity pulled us back together and we started brainstorming. If we were to start over, how would we build Taulia today? It was rough creating Taulia in the beginning, and we knew that more people would continue to build companies like Taulia in the future. If we could enable others to build financial products or enterprise integrations in a more seamless way, it could be the baseline for a whole new financial system. We’d both encountered Bitcoin in the years before, Ethereum had just launched, and we met the Ripple folks back in 2016. The idea of a more democratized way of building a new generation of financial products was a powerful catalyst for us.
Wouldn’t it be great if we took what we built at Taulia and extended it? If these companies were all on a public ledger, and their transactions were visible? And if their transactions were visible, could we find loops to optimize them? Could we enable others to build financial products on that data? Could we create a system that significantly changes how “finance is done”?
For example: if Pfizer owed money to one supplier, and that supplier owed money to another supplier, we could connect the end supplier back to Pfizer and close that loop. We could also find financial dependencies, inject capital where it’s needed most, have publicly verifiable supply-chain reputations for “doing good business”, and more.
This is where the idea for Centrifuge, our fourth company, came from.
This time around, we knew we wanted to do things differently:
We wanted to raise money immediately. At Taulia, we bootstrapped for a long time and it was incredibly stressful (we almost had to take consulting jobs to support ourselves).
We wanted to hire experienced people from the get-go – unlike at Taulia, where Philip had only two interns support him in building the initial product.
We wanted to build the company in Berlin. It was a hotspot for blockchain at the time, and folks from Ethereum, Polkadot and Gnosis had all gathered there. By now, it was no longer the case that you had to be in SF to raise money, and there were more European VCs who could support us. Plus, we felt like decentralization was kind of a rebel idea – and Berlin screams rebel builder much more than SF.
Then, what seems to be the underlying theme of our lives kicked in: we were too early.
Turns out, 2017 was too soon to bring every single (business) transaction on this planet onto a blockchain. Blockchains didn’t scale and privacy was a distant concept. There wasn’t even a concept for what we were trying to do — so we coined the term “Decentralized Finance” that is now used widely for products like Centrifuge.
We pivoted Centrifuge to a simple use-case: a protocol bringing real word assets on chain for financing. We started by tokenizing invoices, then extended into mortgages, consumer debt and carbon credits (our favorite). To this day, Centrifuge is still the leading project in this space – something we’re very proud of.
Yet, three years into building Centrifuge, Philip and I knew it was time to take another break. A serious one.
I was burned out. I had been doing startups for over twenty years and, from 2017 to 2019, worked through a crypto winter where things were so much harder than I thought they’d be. On top of that, I had huge imposter syndrome. I thought I was the only person in crypto that didn’t understand everything that was going on in space. In hindsight, no one really knew anything, but at the time that fear of being the stupidest person in web3 (which, by the way, wasn’t a term back then) was very visceral for me.
For Philip, there was a lot of disillusionment. We went into Centrifuge wanting to change how the financial system worked by introducing a financial ledger and connecting that to the real world. But the general thinking at the time in crypto was: fuck the real world. Again, we were too early. Crypto protocols were serving crypto companies so they could do crypto things. We were completely on the other side of web3. For us, crypto had to serve the real world to make sense, and it was draining being in an industry that was moving so fast without being rooted in a bigger or deeper purpose.
So Philip stopped all crypto work in 2020 and, for some time, wasn’t sure if he wanted anything to do with tech ever again.
Chapter 4: Getting into Climate
While on our respective breaks, Philip and I reached down deep within ourselves. The reality was, what we’d built at Centrifuge wasn’t entirely serving the purpose we wanted it to, and we were both in search of a way to find joy and impact in the work that we did.
In almost any field, the most fundamental and often the hardest work is inner work, and finding joy and impact in our work meant first clarifying our worldview and asking ourselves what problems we felt called upon to contribute to solving, and what counted (for us) as making a difference.
Things started to click into place in 2021. We were still involved in Centrifuge and would have discussions here and there with our co-founders, Lucas and Martin. In one discussion, we were throwing around ideas on whether it would make sense to tokenize carbon credits, and then bring those credits into a Centrifuge pool and finance them.
This was the turning point for us. The realization that we could use what we’d built to bring financing to climate projects. This is something we can get behind, we thought. Something rooted in good, that could be used at scale to fight the highest impact problem today: the destruction of our planet.
And from there, we were hooked. Both individually and together, we dove deep into the climate space, researching, taking classes, joining communities like On Deck, having conversations. Alongside this, we started to angel invest and advise the founders in this space we were meeting. Working to support these founders quickly became our day-to-day.
Fast forward to today, we have 140 investments under our belt, and the time feels right to start Earth.
Chapter 5: Earth
Earth is not very different from what Philip and myself have been doing since we left Centrifuge: investing and advising those building in climate.
So why start it?
Over the years, we’ve developed many relationships in the climate space. As these relationships expanded and grew deeper, we realized just how much power there was in bringing together a group of people who are aligned. People who are working in the same direction, share the same values and ideas, and can mutually support each other.
Our mission with Earth is to work with the greatest founders in climate and best position them to address this challenge above and beyond anything that either me or Philip can do ourselves. And our ecosystem plays a big role in that. Sure, we invest in founders and help them build runway – but a lot of other people can do that too. What a lot of other people can’t do is help you build a plane that actually flies.
We’ve built and flown that plane a few times.
We know how to build software, how to scale it, how to sell it. And we know the types of problems you’ll face along the way. Fundraising, hiring, founder clashes, feeling directionless — we’ve experienced all of these things and can support you through them, either ourselves or with this mission-aligned group of people we are blessed to have cultivated around us. Experts in marketing, product, coaching, communication, storytelling, and more.
For us, Earth brings all of these puzzle pieces together in a beautiful way to help us collectively construct a medium to give – whether that’s money, time, connections, the labor of our hands or minds – to good people who are working to solve the climate emergency we’ve all created. In any industry, startups are a lever that can be used to fight battles quicker and at scale, and the lever we want to pull with Earth is finding quicker and better ways to heal our planet.
So far, we’ve been excited by those working in carbon markets, restoring biodiversity, recycling and reusing materials, energy production, management and optimization, leveraging AI for climate protection, and fintech to provide financing for climate projects (like our recent investment in Fence). The theme underpinning all of this is people who are using software to scale climate impact.
This is where Philip and myself have found the most joy and impact – and that is why we started Earth.
From now on, our plan is to post every week a story or lesson we’ve learned ‘building the plane’ or more about our thesis and investments at Earth. We promise those posts will be much shorter!