The man who saw a reef die - and decided the whole financial architecture of nature needed rebuilding.
Troy Carter grew up on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the Caribbean reef was not a screensaver - it was the view from his backyard. He went to Stanford, studied economics, and did what any ambitious 2011 grad with a sharp mind might do: joined Airbnb before the world understood what Airbnb was. Then he made cider. Then bamboo building materials. Then, in 2015, he watched a coral reef die up close, and none of those previous moves seemed interesting enough anymore.
That moment - visceral, specific, impossible to unsee - sent him down a path that eventually landed him in Sebastopol, California, running Earthshot Labs, a company trying to do something that sounds improbable until you see the numbers: bring genuine scientific rigor to nature-based carbon markets, at planetary scale, using AI, satellite data, and the kind of ecological modeling that carbon auditors never had access to before.
Carbon markets have a credibility problem. Decades of bad verification, optimistic projections, and loose accounting have left the whole sector with a trust deficit. Carter is not interested in reforming that system incrementally. He built a new layer on top of it - a platform that treats forests like financial instruments, not photo opportunities.
Earthshot manages 50+ active projects across more than one million hectares. It has directed over $55 million in project financing. The projects on its books are on track to sequester more than 30 million tonnes of CO2. These are not hypothetical numbers. They are real land, real trees, real farmers and indigenous groups getting paid for keeping ecosystems alive.
Before Earthshot, Carter co-founded RIZOME as Chief Strategy Officer, where he worked with farmers and indigenous communities across Southeast Asia to turn bamboo into climate-positive building material that could replace concrete and steel. The carbon sequestration numbers there were enormous. The insight that carried over to Earthshot: nature is the best carbon technology we have, and the only thing it's missing is the financial infrastructure to make it tradeable.
"Grief is a path to action. Despair is a path to inaction."
- Troy Carter, Earthshot Labs CEOThe year was 2015. Troy Carter was building RIZOME, had just exited a cider company, and was otherwise doing what serial entrepreneurs do between chapters: looking for the next interesting problem. Then he saw a coral reef bleaching event up close. Not in a documentary. In the water.
"I'm more personally motivated by ecological collapse as a crisis," he would say later, "because it affects things that are very real and tangible to me." That sentence sounds like a mission statement. It started as a confession.
RIZOME gave him an education in what happens when you try to use nature as a commercial asset. Bamboo grows faster than any tree, sequesters carbon at enormous rates, can replace concrete and steel in construction - and it barely registers on the radar of the construction industry or the carbon market. The reason is not the bamboo. The reason is the plumbing: the finance structures, the verification systems, the data infrastructure that makes any natural asset tradeable.
That insight became Earthshot. Not a conservation charity. Not a reforestation campaign. An infrastructure company for nature-based finance - one that builds the tools (LandOS, the Biome app, ecosystem forecasting models) that turn forests, reefs, and grasslands into verifiable, investable, scalable financial instruments.
He spent years hosting personal development retreats on his property near Hawaii's Waipio Valley - one of the most dramatically isolated places in the islands - while building the company in parallel. The juxtaposition is not ironic. For Carter, the clarity you find in nature and the urgency to protect it at scale are the same impulse, pointing in different directions.
"I witnessed coral reef damage in 2015. That was the moment that shifted everything."
Troy Carter, on the founding of Earthshot Labs
"There's nothing easier than doing something you're supposed to do."
"Grief is a path to action. Despair is a path to inaction."
"The bigger the problem and the more you care about it, the easier it will be."
"I'm more personally motivated by ecological collapse as a crisis, because it affects things that are very real and tangible to me."
Carter joined Airbnb when the sharing economy was a strange new hypothesis, not a cliche. What he took from that time was not the playbook for building a marketplace - it was the understanding of what happens when you give value to something that previously had no market price. Spare bedrooms. Idle cars. Unused driveways. The Airbnb insight was that value was already there; the market just hadn't organized around it yet. Forests, mangroves, and wetlands carry the same logic. The carbon is already sequestered. The biodiversity is already there. The world just hasn't figured out how to pay for it reliably.
At RIZOME, Carter served as Chief Strategy Officer for a company doing something audacious: replacing wood, steel, and concrete with climate-positive bamboo building materials, sourcing from small farmers and indigenous groups across Southeast Asia. The bamboo was treated with high-pressure borate for fire resistance and longevity - real engineering, not a PR move. The work gave him an intimate understanding of how nature-based supply chains actually work, and how carbon sequestration can be both ecologically real and financially tangible. It also gave him the contacts, the credibility, and the hard-won skepticism of easy claims that would define Earthshot's approach.
The carbon market has failed before, mostly because verification was superficial. Satellite images of forest canopy tell you what was there last year. They don't tell you what the forest will absorb over the 30-year life of a carbon credit. Earthshot's dual-model approach - combining satellite data with process-based ecological modeling that simulates actual biochemical processes - is designed to solve that. It's the difference between checking a patient's weight and actually understanding their metabolic state.
LandOS, the platform Carter's team built, is essentially a Bloomberg Terminal for carbon project developers. You put in a parcel of land, it comes out the other side with an assessment of carbon potential, land eligibility, technical risk factors, and projected sequestration over time. The platform doesn't just reduce risk for investors - it creates a common language between ecologists, land managers, and capital markets that has never fully existed before.
Not content to keep ecological data in the hands of experts, Carter's team also built Biome - a citizen science app that lets anyone with a smartphone collect tree and ecological site observations that feed into Earthshot's global machine learning models. It's a remarkably democratic piece of infrastructure for a company operating in the rarefied world of carbon finance. The pitch is simple: the forests are everywhere, the people living near them are everywhere, and the data they can collect is valuable. Why not build the tool to collect it?
Earthshot is incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation - a legal structure that explicitly obligates the company to consider ecological impact alongside profit. That's not a marketing decision. It's a constraint Carter chose to impose on himself, because he knows that without structural accountability, mission drift is the default outcome for any company that survives long enough to have investors with different timelines than the founder.
For seven years, Carter hosted personal development retreats on his property near Hawaii's Waipio Valley - one of the most remote and spiritually significant landscapes in the Hawaiian islands. He ran them while building companies. The combination reads like a paradox until you understand that for Carter, time in nature is not therapy or recreation. It's research. The urgency he brings to ecological restoration at scale is not abstract. He has spent thousands of hours in the ecosystems he is now trying to protect.
Earthshot's infrastructure spans geospatial analysis, satellite remote sensing, machine learning, and carbon market tooling. The tech stack reflects a company that had to build most of its infrastructure from scratch because the tools it needed didn't exist yet.
Grew up on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Caribbean reef was not a nature documentary - it was home. Which is why watching one die felt personal, not political.
Was an early Airbnb employee before the company was a cultural reference. Learned what it looks like when a market discovers value that was always there but never priced.
Founded a cider company, scaled it, sold it, and moved on. Troy Cider was not a detour - it was his first full lap of the founder track.
Spent seven years hosting personal development retreats on Big Island land near Waipio Valley while simultaneously building climate tech companies. Both practices involve listening to what ecosystems are telling you.
Earthshot is a Public Benefit Corporation. Not for optics. Carter chose the legal structure specifically because he wanted the obligation to be structural, not discretionary.
Before forests, Carter worked with bamboo - partnering with indigenous farmers across Southeast Asia to replace concrete and steel with climate-positive materials. RIZOME was one of the largest bamboo carbon projects on earth.
Economics degree, class of 2011. Spent the next decade proving that the most interesting economics problems are the ones where the market hasn't figured out how to price something obvious yet.
"Are there any large tech businesses that you think represent the best wisdom of humanity? I can't really think of any." - Troy Carter, who builds tech companies.
Not an aspiration. A target with a methodology behind it.