Photo & Editing by KK Ottesen
Tim Carroll is an entrepreneurial leader who uses data and emerging technology to tackle global issues for positive impact. Carroll has delivered successful exits of start-ups and led dramatic growth for large global solutions companies, most recently as head of Microsoft’s Azure Weather and Climate portfolio. Carroll serves on the advisory board of William and Mary’s Global Research Institute and is a Terra Alpha investor.
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How do you think about sustainability, and how did you come to know Terra Alpha’s work?
I did not come to the sustainability world from a crunchy perspective. Mine was not born of that. Mine was born of, hey, this is a real problem we have to solve, as opposed to a ton of emotion; the emotions came over time. Because for most of history, we, and I don’t think it’s just Americans, have always viewed the climate as providing infinite resources. And in business, value is assigned to things that are finite: supply and demand. Well, guess what? The planet is now a finite resource. And so the companies that acknowledge that and start thinking about it in terms of fuels, emissions, water, the conditions in which employees live — if I’ve got 250,000 employees, I want to know where they are, where my factories are. There are so many things where the planet, before, just gave and gave and gave, and now it’s taking back.
And if you are a company and your mandate is to be looking 10, 20, 50 years out, you need to be making those investments now. The healthiest companies are going to be the ones to acknowledge where we are, whether publicly or privately, but acknowledge it through their investments. And that’s what Tim’s team does. They look not at what people are saying; they look at what they’re doing. And so the value of Terra Alpha is that they’re looking for the companies that are thinking long-term in an area that is going to be absolutely essential to a company’s long-term viability. And so even if I wasn’t in this space, to me, the investment thesis makes sense, because it’s supply and demand. I am part of his fund because I believe it’s the right approach on multiple levels because of my direct experience.
Can you talk about that experience and your path to climate-related work?
I got to climate because of COVID, actually, because I had been a supercomputer person. And what I loved about that was that I got exposure to all sorts of science, high energy physics, working with the Department of Defense (DOD) folks remediating nuclear stockpiles using simulation rather than blowing stuff up. Genomics when the human genome was split and they all of a sudden had all this data. And so how do you process all that data to get something meaningful for doctors? Well, use supercomputers. So I’ve been really fortunate to be at these cool periods in history where this very nerdy technology actually had a pretty profound role.
When COVID hit, I was working at Microsoft, and I sent out an email to a bunch of people within Microsoft and just said, “Hey, this is the time for high performance computing.” Because high performance computing is about giving better answers faster. At the time, people were not doing that kind of work in the cloud as much. They still wanted to have supercomputers they could hug and were on-premises. Because of that, I got pulled into a project: Neil Ferguson, was the epidemiologist who came up with the statistical model that had the projections of what was going to happen if COVID-19 went unremediated and millions of people were going to die as a result. That model played a role in how the US began to address COVID in a more meaningful way. This is in the winter between ’19 and ’20. It was three months of calls every day, getting this model so that it could run on cloud, it could scale, people could trust it so that they could see how the model ran. The other key part is that it used to be that these models people built had this super nerdy output that was almost like its own language, like the Lord of the Rings or something, where the people prided themselves on nobody being able to interpret this stuff. But it was like, No, man, you have to put a front end on this so that policy makers can understand what this means, and understand it fast.
So many people did so many things right with the project. Everybody got out of their own way. Microsoft did things super efficiently. The US government did things super efficiently. The British government. We’d identified the problem we needed to solve, and we were on it.
Then, over the summer, the group got disbanded and everybody went back to their day jobs. I was like, this process that we went through was awesome, but what’s a problem that we’re never going to solve? Climate change. So I wrote a paper titled, “There’s No Vaccine for Climate Change.” The premise was not that I had a cure for climate change, but that the cure was going to be that we — government and private industry — need to work more closely together. It needs a sustained program that both sides are committed to. And so I pivoted most of the work I was doing from health to weather and climate.
The last project I was on at Microsoft, was to understand the impact of our data centers relative to how much energy we consume, how much water we require in order to cool what we are powering, and then what are the greenhouse gases we’re emitting because of the fossil fuels used to power the data center? But there’s also an extraordinary footprint of greenhouse gas emissions related to all the concrete you pour, all the steel you hang — all of those elements. So I was concerned with: What’s that energy number? You have to have that source of truth as to what level of energy is required even down to every time somebody hits “enter” on a ChatGPT search.
While one would think, Hey, it’s cloud companies, it’s big tech, that’s a relatively easy number to go capture. It is not; a lot of work goes into getting the energy number.
But what I actually loved doing prior to that was working on using all of our computing resources to provide better platforms for the weather and climate models people are building. So when tech companies say, “Hey, how much energy do we actually use in our data centers?” That is a bit of a distraction if you don’t also look at the broader context of what good we are doing with the AI in order to get there. I really enjoyed being on the what’s-the-good-we’re-doing side. And it was because of that tug of wanting to go do something good and something I have a measure of control over, that I decided it was time to leave Microsoft last spring.
So as you write your next chapter, what impact would you like to have?
When people talk about sustainability and all these other words that have become loaded over the last year or two or three, there’s really two terms: mitigation, and either adaptation or resilience. Mitigation is how do we stop damaging the planet that we live on? So that’s ultimately how do we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels? How do we do the things that science has told us we need to do? Adaptation and resilience is the converse. How do we protect ourselves from the planet that we have been adversely affecting? To me, that’s really interesting because weather is the thing that affects every single human on the planet. If you want to do something that’s got impact, that’s pretty good in terms of addressable markets.
So my circuitous route to how I got to this point is what it is, but for whatever reason, I understand this strange intersection of weather and climate and commercial and government and all the rest of the stuff. And you reach the point, not only in your career, but in life, when you realize: I think I have all these tools for a reason. So if you can make it easier for not just governments and big corporations, but for citizens and scientists to be able to use the technology and infrastructure out there in order to come up with better, more accurate, more timely models, whether weather or climate, those are the things that have direct applicability on a farmer in Kenya with a smartphone. The farmer is now proactively being contacted in their native dialect saying, “Hey, you were probably thinking you were going to harvest your crop in a week and a half, but looking at the long-term weather forecast, you may want to bring that crop in in the next four days.” Or something along those lines. You’re talking about material impact. I mean, if that person is a sustenance farmer, that’s the difference between life or death over the course of the next year. So my goal is, I guess, do something in a non-flashy, nobody-ever-heard-of-you way, but that I know had a profound impact.
What have you been seeing in development, or in action, right now?
There’s this interesting dynamic that’s happening because of the current environment we’re in. Traditionally, the big weather and forecast agencies, which were the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US and probably six or seven big weather centers around the world, did most of the forecasting. And most of the commercial world sat around and said, “Okay, well, we’ll just wait for whatever it is that they tell us.” Because those were the centers of gravity, that’s where the researchers worked, that’s also where they had the supercomputers.
If you were somebody on the outside of that world and you wanted to go do something cool, it might take you months just to get on a supercomputer somewhere to then run it and then get the output. For a whole variety of reasons, that process was somewhat inefficient. And then what we’ve had in the last, call it five years, is this conversion of cloud computing, which means anybody’s now got a supercomputer, if they can afford it, anybody’s got access. And then you have AI, and also a bunch of investment going into weather and climate because of various government incentives. And so we’ve really seen a remarkable amount of progress in the last five years, whether you want to call it privatization, commercialization, democratization. These tools just became available to a lot more people.
So now, I see all of the time people coming up with not only big cool ideas, but really small cool ideas that they then, just because of the nature of the community, just make available. They open source it, right? It’ is encouraging. And it’s one of the reasons that if I’ve got one last dash through the finish line in my career, that’s where I want to spend it. Because it’s this unique place where big things can happen, but you’ve also got this spirit of people that come up with a better mousetrap and then make it available, knowing it will have impact.
What gives you hope in this work?
It recharges me so much when you hear young people talk about the need to address a changing climate, and they talk about it just very matter-of-factly. It’s just one of the things that factor into what they want to do. When they talk about having impact going forward, they don’t say, “I want to figure out how to bring the temperature down one degree Celsius.” It’s, “I want to figure out how in my corner of the world, which might be going to work for a consulting company or going to work for the State Department or wherever else, I want to figure out how I can factor climate-related issues into the work that I’m doing.”
How worried are you about the rate at which we’re addressing what needs to be done?
I am worried, but my worry is not that climate change is going to result in a Dino De Laurentiis production where the East Coast falls into the Atlantic Ocean. I think almost more damaging is that human civilization has always been able to say, “Well, we’ll just make some adjustments…” Air conditioning is a good example. People are like, “Well, if it gets hotter, I’ll just turn up the air conditioning.” With what? The power grid was not designed to cool houses. So I’m afraid that within my kids’ generation, you’re going to see more haves and have nots — people who have the ability to be resilient to everything going on around them, and then people who do not. And that’s not who we’re supposed to be. Science should be used to raise all boats, to help everybody. And I’m afraid that if there’s not enough investment in the public good, all efforts will be around assisting those who have the means as opposed to being able to make sure that we’re universally helping everybody.
As you try to stay optimistic or nimble in thinking about the problems, what are inspiring examples you’ve seen?
This sounds corny, but it’s not any one thing that I point to. It’s that friend of mine who runs the scientific computing at NASA Goddard, and we go to lunch and talk about things people our age talk about, plantar fasciitis, the rest of it. But to hear him say, “Yeah, all this [political] stuff is a distraction right now. We don’t like it, but we just keep going.” The folks I speak to at NASA, and the young people, they’re not giving up. They just keep moving forward. And because of my startup background, I get a lot of calls from people who have started weather or climate startups. And so I’ve just seen this breadth of tools that are like, Man, that’s awesome. Right? I’m not sure you got a business there. It’s the old Shark Tank thing, right? That’s not a company, that’s a widget. But I just see so many widgets out there that, regardless of whether people argue about the bigger topics, I feel like that we are going to be able to get information into the hands of farmers in the US or any number of people starved for this kind of data. And it’s not perfect, but it’s better than they’ve got, which is nothing right now. And so I’m like, All right, it’s time to close the browser, reset my algorithm, and just focus on the science and moving forward.
Talking to people, whether startup people coming to you or policymakers, or investors, what is advice that you give?
People are super concerned with AI, and they should be, about this intersection of technology and society, or technology and career, technology and anything. It still requires a human to figure out the right question to ask. So start with what’s the actual problem that you’re trying to solve for, and then what’s the most valuable problem that you’re trying to solve for? For some people, value is the total addressable market, and it’s measured in time, dollars, and cents. For other people, its value is based on what are you giving back? And so what I tell young people, especially if they’ve got startups, I say, “Look, the trick is to find the overlap between the two.” So, if you can work at that intersection of the total addressable market and be good for people, you can be successful, but also feel like you gave more than you took.