"Sustainable business, open-water swimming, and living in Oakland, CA."
In 2006, the phrase "corporate sustainability" still sounded like something a PR team invented on a Wednesday. Pete May bought into it anyway. He and Joel Makower purchased GreenBiz.com from the nonprofit that ran it, took on the commercial risk, and started building what would eventually become the most important platform in the corporate climate space.
The move wasn't naive idealism. May had spent over two decades at B2B media companies - Miller Freeman, CMP, Primedia - learning exactly how trade publishing works: find an audience with a professional problem, give them better information than anyone else, and get them in the same room once a year. He applied that playbook to sustainability at precisely the moment corporate America was waking up to the idea that "green" might actually be good business.
Eighteen years later, the bet looks obvious in hindsight. At the time, it was a contrarian call. May had everything to lose and a niche website to gain. He chose the niche.
Today, Trellis Group - the name GreenBiz became in May 2024 - runs flagship conferences like GreenBiz and Circularity, maintains peer networks connecting sustainability professionals across Fortune 500 companies, publishes the Trellis Briefing newsletter, and employs 140 people from its base in Oakland, California. The company's annual revenue sits at $11.4 million. It raised $1.4 million in its last funding round back in 2008 and hasn't needed venture capital to scale since.
May still works out of Oakland, where he also serves on the City's Workforce Development Board - a civic role focused on expanding economic opportunities for East and West Oakland residents. He swims in open water. He shows up in person at climate conferences, writing dispatches from Paris, Montreal, and wherever else the world's sustainability leaders gather.
"For more than 25 years, Trellis Group has empowered professional communities to confront the climate crisis."Trellis Group Mission Statement - Oakland, CA
There's a specific kind of media founder who doesn't just cover a beat - they build the infrastructure around it. Pete May is that kind of founder. GreenBiz didn't just report on corporate sustainability. It created the annual calendar event that sustainability officers plan their year around, the peer network that lets them compare notes without competitive risk, and the newsletter that lands in inboxes before the news cycle catches up.
May's background in B2B publishing gave him an unusual vantage point. He wasn't an environmentalist who learned business. He was a business operator who saw sustainability coming before the market priced it in. That combination - commercial discipline meeting genuine conviction about the climate transition - is exactly what it took to build a durable media business in this space.
The Folio 40 recognition in 2010 came at a moment when media itself was in crisis. Classifieds had collapsed. Digital advertising was being captured by platforms. Most B2B publishers were scrambling. May was building events-led revenue, peer communities, and research reports - the model the rest of the industry would spend the next decade chasing.
He also writes. His bylines from COP21 in Paris and COP15 in Montreal aren't delegation pieces - they're a president who still believes in showing up in person. The story of BMW's circular economy work. A week with European sustainability leaders at a Verbund retreat. A letter from Nantes, Europe's then-green capital. These dispatches have a quality that distinguishes May from pure operators: he remains curious about the subject matter itself.
In Oakland, he sits on the City's Workforce Development Board - an appointment with a different dimension than sustainability media. The board focuses on economic opportunity in East and West Oakland, communities that sit largely outside the sustainability industry's primary demographic. It's a reminder that the climate transition is supposed to benefit everyone, and that May thinks about this more concretely than most conference organizers do.
Trellis Group operates across three interconnected channels. Its digital media platform publishes sustainability news, case studies, and research for corporate practitioners. The Trellis Network connects sustainability professionals across hundreds of organizations for peer learning and benchmarking. And its flagship events - GreenBiz, Circularity, GreenFin - draw thousands of executives, investors, and policymakers each year.
The compound effect of these three channels is significant: Trellis isn't just a publisher, it's a professional community with its own calendar, vocabulary, and sense of shared purpose. Pete May built that from a website he bought from a nonprofit in 2006.
Recognized in 2010 as a media industry influencer and innovator - a rare honor in a year when most publishers were contracting.
Scaled a niche sustainability website into a 140-person media and events organization generating $11.4M annual revenue.
Personally covered COP21 in Paris and COP15 in Montreal, writing firsthand dispatches from the world's most critical climate negotiations.
Built a professional peer community that connects sustainability leaders across hundreds of Fortune 500 companies for benchmarking and knowledge sharing.
Serves on the City of Oakland's Workforce Development Board, focused on expanding economic opportunity for East and West Oakland residents.
Stayed the course on corporate sustainability media from 2006 to today - through financial crises, pandemic disruptions, and industry consolidation.
Pete May is an open-water swimmer — fitting for someone who navigated sustainable business through cold, murky corporate waters for two decades before everyone else showed up.
GreenBiz.com was originally run by a nonprofit. May and Makower saw commercial potential in 2006 when the idea of charging for sustainability intelligence was still controversial.
The company raised $1.4M in Series A funding in 2008 - the year of the financial crisis - and has operated without external capital since. Self-funded growth is unusual in media.
His career spans the full arc of B2B media: Miller Freeman, CMP, Primedia - the companies that built the trade press infrastructure of the 1990s. He then applied that knowledge to a category no one else was taking seriously.
The Trellis Group rebrand in May 2024 came 18 years after May purchased GreenBiz.com. Most media companies don't survive 18 years. Most sustainability organizations weren't around in 2006.
May holds a B.A. in Business Economics and History from UC Santa Barbara - a combination that probably explains both his commercial instincts and his interest in first-person dispatches from climate summits.