The following interview is a conversation we had with Tim Weiss, CEO & Co-Founder of Optera, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $17.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Carbon Management and Accounting.
Tim Weiss
Thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
Not a problem. Super excited for this conversation and I would just love to begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Tim Weiss
Sure. Yes. As you mentioned, I’m Tim Weiss, CEO co-founder, Optera. My whole career has been oriented towards climate change and addressing kind of what I feel is one of the bigger problems that we’ve ever felt as a society and as a human race. This started way back in undergrad when I studied environmental policy. I mashed together kind of economics, political science, environmental science, and kind of found that it was the perfect meld for me of heart and mind. I’m fundamentally a data nerd and also kind of very mission driven as a human and want to kind of orient my skills and my time towards big problems. And so there were none kind of better suited to my skills and my ambitious in life than really helping address climate change and solving that problem.
Tim Weiss
Ultimately working for NGO, I started my career in southern Africa, working on very distributed renewable energy in areas where folks live without access to the grid and scaling that organization to four countries and really understanding what does it take to get something off the ground and what does it take to actually have an impact on people’s lives. And really that was my first taste of entrepreneurship in a different setting. And I knew from then that I was going to orient my career on sustainability, on climate, and then also probably have a bent of entrepreneurship along the way.
Brett
Trey, how have you seen the conversation around climate change over the last, let’s say, ten years?
Tim Weiss
Trey well, I would say when I started in this journey, we didn’t talk about climate change. It was interesting, especially in conversations with sustainability functions in large multinationals. There was a very roundabout way of oriented towards like, why are we doing this and what are we doing? And kind of treading lightly in certain areas, and now its fully front and center. I mean, the global conversation is pretty apropos to the corporate conversation at this point. And I would say the corporations and many are a step ahead. One of the biggest risks thats posed to business right now is how are you going to transition to low carbon economy? Were not going to consume fossil fuels to the same degree that we have historically as we will in the next five to ten years.
Tim Weiss
And I think as the timely nature of that risk and opportunity is presented in front of business leaders, the overall appetite to make real investments and to really move in this area has fundamentally changed. And so from ten years ago where we saw this being done with a handful of companies and 100% voluntarily, and I would say without really much accountability and much at stake, it feels like the stakes are incredibly high and the intentions to follow through, the intentions to make meaningful progress, are higher than ever.
Brett
Let’s switch gears now. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the company and let’s talk about the history first. I understand it has a long history here. It’s not a new startup. So take us back to the founding of the company or the early days of the company, and then let’s talk through when you joined and when you got involved.
Tim Weiss
Yeah, so there was a precursor firm prior to that kind of led into Optera. It was a boutique consulting firm that founded way back in 2006 by my co founders. They started this consulting firm that spun out of an organization kind of called the Rocky Mountain Institute. And they were supporting large multinationals on their energy strategy, on establishing and quantifying kind of their emissions, establishing their sustainability programs, setting meaningful targets for energy efficiency, for renewable energy, for climate, and a lot of the foundational work that they’d done with some multinationals kind of set the standards that are now pretty well used across the industry today. I met them in 2015. It was around when the Paris agreement was getting signed, and we saw a significant uptick in corporate ambition on climate change. They were setting goals that were fundamentally challenging to achieve.
Tim Weiss
And what we did is market research together. I was finishing business school and working at AE’s and their distributed energy team, and was interested in getting into corporate sustainability with all of this activity coming out of Paris. And so we interviewed folks from GM and procter and gamble and Cisco and Cola, like really super large brands, large companies that were setting more ambitious goals. And really the proposition was, how are you guys going to hit these? How are you going to manage the data behind these initiatives? And the answer was all spreadsheets and consultants, and they didn’t really have their hands around all the information they needed and insights they need to make meaningful progress. So with that, I jumped ship.
Tim Weiss
I joined my co founders, Jason and Ty, and we started building what has now become Upterra and transitioning from software company, transitioning from services company to now a SaaS company. We made that transition. We bootstrapped for a handful of years, and then I went out and raised our seed round in 2020. So from really 2021 on, we’ve been on the venture back path. You know, as you mentioned, raised our a series a last year, and it’s really been kind off to the races since then. As a predominantly SaaS based business, what.
Brett
Was that journey like, transitioning from a services business to software? I know a lot of companies dream of being able to make that switch, but I think a lot of companies also die as they make that transition. What did you guys get right?
Tim Weiss
Yeah, I think the fundamentals are you got to have discipline. Services businesses can go any direction the client wants, and you can kind of sell anything. Then you right away when you start building product and software, that becomes completely unviable, right, where you can’t build everything, you have to build something that works for a critical mass, that helps you get to certain product market fit and scale, because you cannot just send engineers in all directions at once. So for us, this started, honestly by building a pretty insane Excel model. I’m not an engineer by training, but now they’re my co founders, or they’re physical engineers, not computer engineers. And so we built a prototype of our software in excel that we used across half a dozen clients. And what we saw is that it was delivering value across all of them.
Tim Weiss
And if we actually wrote code and build this into a platform, it could deliver exponentially more value. And they didn’t really need bespoke solutions. They all needed something similar. And we built it kind of in a way that was transferable across industries, across company size. So it was really about keeping that level of discipline in. The power of a services business is you can learn so much from your customers, and that’s what you need to start a business. You need to understand what value prop you have. You need to understand what their needs are. And I believe that, like, professional services are a tremendous way to understand that when you are on the hook for really delivering and really catering to their needs, you have to balance that with something that is repeatable, something that is going to be transferable across customers, across clients.
Tim Weiss
I fundamentally think that balance is something that we just got right, and it’s hard. You got to say no to things, you got to say yes to some things and then know that you’re going to keep delivering those with services and not productize them yet. And that balance is something that I think a lot of folks struggle with, and they don’t quite find that critical mass and they don’t find the thing that’s repeatable. And were fortunate to find that.
Brett
Outside of funding, are there any numbers that you can share just so we can understand the scale that you’re operating at today?
Tim Weiss
Yeah, we have roughly 60 folks on our team, and we’re well beyond the, I would say, the early innings on revenue. We have a lot of multinationals using our platform. We’re well entrenched in there in their workflows across their organizations, so rapidly appearing kind of trending towards our later straight stage growth rounds. And the key milestones there, that’s kind of general size and magnitude of where.
Brett
We are when it comes to the marketing philosophy. How would you describe your approach to marketing?
Tim Weiss
For us, a lot of it is driven by building a reputable brand. We sell to large enterprise, and large enterprise is long sales cycles, complicated sales cycles there. It’s a very discerning buyer. And so for us, content strategy is really important. A lot of what we do is really ensuring that we are building customer referral engines and amplifying kind of the voices of our customers that love us and sing our praises. And that’s really kind of the core focus. We have built really strong partnerships and try to leverage those to their greatest effect. And so a lot of our work stems from kind of thought leadership and a strong foundation in content and branding that we kind of leverage to help go after kind of large enterprise and build what we feel is a meaningful presence in the market.
Tim Weiss
This show is brought to you by.
Brett
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Brett
Yeah, your branding is just beautiful, and I recommend that everyone listening in to go check it out because it’s just great branding. Also on the website, the messaging is just very crisp. It’s very clear what you do exactly. I often bring chatters on and I’m trying to prep for the interview, and I’m on their website and I spend ten minutes and I have no idea what they do with your website. It’s very clear. Was it always that way, though, or was it a journey to get this level of message clarity?
Tim Weiss
Oh, it was. It was a complete journey. I’ve learned about myself over the years and over this journey, that as a leader, one of my core functions is to provide clarity to all the key stakeholders, to my team, to customers, to investors. And the more clear you are, the more effective you are at your job. And so theres a bit of, I would say a forcing function, I think, that was driving this, where me and my team, and I give a lot of credit to my team on this, where we just weren’t satisfied with mediocrity in terms of communication. We still aren’t. We never are. And so were always trying to find the most precise, clear way of articulating ourselves to the market and to customers, to everyone.
Tim Weiss
Some of my most satisfying moments from a business context, or when we hit those moments of clarity, when we find that, aha. Where it’s like, oh, it just makes sense now, like, I can explain this to someone who doesn’t know anything about what we do, and it takes a discerning eye. You have to critique yourself. I think founders that have raised capital, that have hit some milestones and gone to maybe 102, three, four, 5 million in revenue, they feel a bit of satisfaction, of clear success points on themselves or from their work. But you have to always kind of view your own work with a critical eye. And I think that’s the only way to get at really meaningful outcomes and messaging.
Tim Weiss
And I think it’s been having an incredible team that is not comfortable with what we view as mediocrity, I think is what helps us get to that point. And we’re still working. I’d say that there’s nothing about what we’ve done is perfect, and we just have to constantly make it better and better.
Brett
What about your market category? Is it carbon management? Carbon accounting?
Tim Weiss
Yeah, predominantly. We’re operating in one of. Maybe other folks feel this way about their own industries, but we are in a very messy landscape where there’s a million different players, and they’re all trying to take different approaches to this challenge. But for us, ultimately, we are a carbon emissions management platform for multinationals. We’re helping organizations quantify and manage the emissions from everything that they touch, from how their products are manufactured from their operations, from the products that they sell. If they’re an investor, their investment assets, everything that you will need to transition to low carbon economy. Now you need data on it, you need to report it, disclose it to the world, and thats what we help enable.
Brett
Trey, did you start off being enterprise focused or were you SMB mid market and then worked your way up to enterprise?
Tim Weiss
We started enterprise. Its different from a lot of other markets where if you think about how sustainability and climate is unfolding, pressure to address climate change is starting from the top, ultimately mid market SMEs, they don’t really have a lot of emissions to manage. They don’t really have existential risks as they transition to the low carbon economy. A lot of that work is going to be done for them because their utilities are going to get cleaner. The AWS servers or Google Azure, all the servers that they’re going to use to operate their business are already going to net zero. And so really the pressure from investors, regulators, customers has always been applied to the largest companies in the world. And then it ripples down market. And thats what we’ve done. We’ve followed that pressure, we’ve followed that momentum.
Tim Weiss
We cater to large enterprise and we view it as were building the solution that works for where the market is today and where its evolving to. And so were building solutions that can really, truly scale across kind of all large enterprise and then down market as well.
Brett
Can you paint a picture for us of what that category landscape looks like when it comes to carbon management and carbon accounting? I really just want to understand how you are positioned within that market because I know its a crowded space. I read TechCrunch every day and I feel like there’s more and more startups that are trying to move into this category. So how do you think about positioning in the category?
Tim Weiss
Yeah, it’s an incredibly crowded, noisy space and it’s because there’s not a lot of mystery here. This is now regulated industry. I mean, earlier this week we’re talking in early March, the SEC just released or finalized their rules that require public companies to disclose their carbon emissions and also their climate risk. This is falling on the heels of California having even more extensive rule for any company that essentially touches the California economy and then also in Europe is five steps ahead with more meaningful regulation as well. So ultimately theres a lot of demand and everyone sees a lot of opportunity here, which has created a lot of interest and a lot of competitors and a lot of investors attracted to it.
Tim Weiss
Ultimately, what we find is that this industry is not for the faint of heart, because the challenges in helping an organization not only measure but decarbonize across everything, not just their operations, but their supply chain, their products, their investment assets, can all the core functions, the logistics, all these things, is immensely challenging. And providing them information that is not only accurate, but its actually actionable. And its not just using black boxes, or not just using high level industry averages or assumptions, but using direct data is a really challenging proposition. What we’ve gone after. And so I’d say that there’s a lot of companies that have attempted to build what I would characterize as an easy button in climate. So a really simple calculator that would apply to giving you the 30,000 foot view or would apply to SMEs.
Tim Weiss
But if you’re dealing with a company that is meaningfully trying to achieve real outcomes, and if they are really trying to de risk their business, if they’re really trying to manage their supply chain and influence the behavior of how their products are made, then you need real data. You actually need to know what those suppliers are, what share of their activity you’re responsible for, and where is it stemming from in the world. And thats what we do better than anyone else. And so we’ve kind of clued in on ultimately, the upper echelons of this market require real information, real data, and thats what were the best at. And I think that its rooted in that kind of foundation of us understanding this from a services and expert services mentality. And then building product that works for hundreds and thousands of companies.
Tim Weiss
Thats a little bit of our sweet spot. I think that most of the other folks in our market are many others. And I have a lot of respect for a lot of our competitors. I think were all trying to solve a really hard problem. And its great that folks are, I think, for us, were just a little bit more laser focused on, id say, some of the meaty problems that span complicated supply chains, complicated product type value chains, and others might be focused on more simpler companies or different types of industry verticals that we don’t particularly interact with to date.
Brett
What do you think has been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made?
Tim Weiss
Oh, that’s a good question. I gotta say that, like, maybe this isn’t that much. I don’t think it’s not like a silver bullet, but like, having customers that love you is the most important thing. And they have been our best sales channel. When you are competing in an industry where everyone is sending them paid ads, everyone has millions of dollars to spend on marketing and advertising. Whats the best way to cut through? Well say, hey, I use Optera and I love it. You shouldn’t take their call. Im like theres nothing better. And we just tried to build that love that referral engine and we keep doing you’re never done. And that supersedes any other spend that you can do, any other kind of initiative you could have. And it’s hard.
Tim Weiss
It requires a lot of work and a lot of attention and I would say a relentless pursuit of quality. And that’s something that I think a lot of folks, it certainly worked in our industry in a crowded space that focuses on enterprise. So building that customer referral engine is something that’s been probably the most important critical factor of our success.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here?
Tim Weiss
We’re trying to help the globe decarbonize, and that is going to happen through companies. Companies touch global emissions. If you’re going to look for the lever points to tackle climate change, government is going touch this through regulation of companies. And so what’s really going to happen is companies are going to move the needle and they need data and tools to do that effectively. So for us, this is about global scale. This is about going after the companies that matter the most in transition to low carbon economy. Fundamentally, that’s where I think the most value in this market is going to be derived from. And that’s kind of been our focus. So I won’t be satisfied until we are facilitating and helping thousands of the largest companies in the world ultimately achieve net zero.
Brett
Love it. Love the vision. I really love this conversation. We are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in and they want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Tim Weiss
Yeah, follow me on LinkedIn. I’m probably most active there. And I’ll just say that I love interacting with founders. We’re a unique breed, people that really want to solve and tackle meaty problems and so always happy to connect.
Brett
Awesome. Tim, thanks so much for taking the time.
Tim Weiss
Thank you, Brett.
Brett
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