Finding the solution

Josh Dorfman, co-founder and CEO of Supercool, a media platform spotlighting companies building the low-carbon economy, recalled the first time he became concerned about the future of the environment. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Dorfman moved to China and was working at an American bicycle lock factory while teaching English at university in Nanjing.

“I was traveling with the Chinese owner of the factory,” Dorfman said. “We get to this parking lot. Every car is a Mercedes, and he's like, ‘Josh, look my Mercedes is the biggest Mercedes in the parking lot.’

When he realized that most Chinese people, like Americans, wanted big cars rather than bicycles, he began thinking more critically about the environment. At the time, he didn’t know much about climate change, but he asked himself, “What does one billion more cars on the planet mean?”

So when Dorfman returned to the United States at the age of 25, he began to educate himself about climate change. He remembered thinking, “How is it possible that I never learned any of this? Why isn't anyone talking about this?”

But he was confused about how to intertwine this concern with his other newfound interest: business. At the same time that he was going to protests surrounding the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the World Bank, he was also applying to MBA programs. And while he was eager to go to business school, he said, “I think we have this huge climate problem and I think corporations and businesses are actually contributing to it.”

This problem seeped into his home life as well. When he would come home for Thanksgiving, he often made his family members uncomfortable by talking about climate issues. “I don't want to make everyone feel terrible for nothing about climate change, because scolding people wasn't getting them to do anything different,” he said.

So Dorfman sought out a way to make a career out of his passion for sustainability. This began with where he grew up, in Westchester County outside of New York City, where he saw firsthand the effects of consumer culture. “Everybody likes nice stuff,” he said. “Maybe there’s a path for me to use business to help move that consumption in a more sustainable direction.” But it would take many years to figure out how to effect change. He graduated with his MBA from Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management and started a sustainable furniture company that followed a direct-to-consumer model. His plan was to cut out the middleman and make the costs of eco-friendly materials more affordable. Eventually, he found a partner and created a new company, Plantd, that manufactured sustainable materials with carbon removal as the goal. The idea was to move away from using trees by turning fast-growing perennial grass into high-performance, carbon-negative products.

After starting the company, Dorfman began to discover hundreds of other companies working toward sustainable solutions and making real progress. But there was little coverage of them in the mainstream media, which primarily focused on climate change problems or more distant technological solutions. “This lane of companies and solutions that are already here, that are working and scaling, building really big business, that just wasn’t being covered,” he said. “I felt like there was an opportunity [here].”

He pivoted to exploring the power of media in environmental solutions. Hence Supercool was born, a platform where Dorfman interviews founders and climate companies working toward sustainability, and most importantly, real-world solutions in action.

Dorfman emphasizes that the podcast isn’t just a form of climate journalism; it is also meant to reach the kind of person he was in his early 20s, when he first began connecting business with the environment. “When you’re building a media company, you have to key into trends,” he said. “You should listen to Supercool because we’re showing you the companies that are actually building the future. For people who are into business and innovation, this fits that lens.”