Eric
Faurot

Building the Room Where It Happens

In February 2025, Eric Faurot stepped onto the stage at GreenBiz 25 and delivered a keynote called "Making the Unseen Seen." It is a precise description of his career. For three-plus decades, he has been in the business of making ideas visible - building the rooms, the networks, and the publications where practitioners actually meet each other and move things forward.

Most recently, that room was Trellis Group - the Oakland-based B2B media company he ran as CEO from 2010 to mid-2024. During that 14-year run, what started as GreenBiz Group became one of the most influential platforms in the global sustainability sector, producing editorial media, peer networks, and live events that serve tens of thousands of corporate sustainability professionals worldwide.

In July 2024, Faurot handed the CEO role to Hana Kajimura and shifted into a Growth Leader capacity, still involved and still building. His LinkedIn summary puts it plainly: he is not done. He never really stops.

From COMDEX to Carbon Markets

Faurot graduated from Pitzer College in 1986 with a degree in Political Philosophy. That is not the obvious starting point for a media executive who would eventually grow a live-events division by $25 million in three years - but it turns out that questions about how societies organize themselves and make decisions together are exactly the right preparation for building professional communities at scale.

His career began in the thick of tech-media boom at Miller Freeman, where he spent nearly a decade as Vice President through the 1990s. Then came the dot-com era bet: he co-founded Verybig.com as CEO in 2000, riding and weathering the wave before pivoting to MediaLive International in 2003.

The most instructive chapter before sustainability came at TechWeb, the UBM division that owned some of the biggest technology conferences of the era. Between 2006 and 2009, Faurot served as Senior Vice President and Board Member, and grew the live event division from $38 million to $63 million in revenue over three years. The conferences he oversaw included COMDEX (the largest tech trade show of the era), INTEROP, Black Hat (the cybersecurity conference that still runs today), and the Web 2.0 Summit.

That portfolio reads like a who's who of late-stage internet-boom conference culture. He was not just attending these events - he was running them, understanding the mechanics of how professional communities gather, how revenue flows through sponsorships and tickets, how editorial credibility and live experience amplify each other.

When GreenBiz Group came looking for a CEO in 2010, they were not hiring someone who understood sustainability from the inside out. They were hiring someone who understood how to build a platform, how to scale a community, and how to make a B2B media business work. The bet paid off across 14 years.

Fourteen Years, One Transformation

When Faurot joined GreenBiz Group, it was a sustainability-focused media and events company built around the editorial reputation of founder Joel Makower. Makower had spent two decades establishing GreenBiz as a trusted voice on the intersection of business and environmental responsibility. Faurot's job was to build the business around that editorial core.

He did. Over his tenure, the company grew to more than 80 employees, developed multiple major event brands, and built what amounts to the infrastructure of the corporate sustainability conversation. The company's rebranding to Trellis Group - which happened during his watch - was not a cosmetic change. It signaled a deliberate expansion of scope: from "green business" to the full spectrum of climate action, circular economy, sustainable finance, and corporate decarbonization.

Makower himself, when announcing an extended sabbatical in 2023, pointed explicitly to Faurot and the leadership team as evidence that the organization had matured enough to operate without its founder's daily presence. That kind of institutional confidence is not announced; it is built.

Faurot's approach to the work reflects a particular theory: that sustainability challenges are not separate problems to solve in sequence, but interconnected ones to address simultaneously. "By bringing together different sustainability initiatives," he said when launching Trellis Impact 25, "we can help unlock newfound synergies and business opportunities thereby accelerating positive impact." The conferences are not just gatherings - they are, in his framing, tools for systems change.

The Trellis Impact 25 Bet

One of Faurot's last major strategic moves as CEO was also one of his boldest: Trellis Impact 25, which combined three previously separate flagship conferences - VERGE, BLOOM, and GreenFin - into a single unified sustainability event.

The logic is straightforward and somewhat counterintuitive. In an industry that often fragments its challenges by domain - climate tech over here, biodiversity over there, green finance in a third room - Trellis Impact 25 argued that the convergence is the point. The leaders working on corporate decarbonization and the leaders working on nature-based solutions and the leaders working on climate finance are all trying to pull on the same rope. Putting them in the same room unlocks conversations that separated tracks cannot.

Whether the bet works depends on execution. But the instinct - that systemic problems require systemic convening - tracks with everything in Faurot's career. He grew up building the rooms where industries talk to themselves. He spent 14 years applying that craft to one of the most consequential industries of the 21st century.