Big ideas die in the gap between what's possible and who's willing to say yes. We help leaders close that gap.
Yes, we're native to data and AI and digital media, but we carry an older toolkit too: direct outreach, community organizing, storytelling, PR, the patient art of opening someone's mind.
We've done it for the world's largest institutions and for scrappy startups alike. Today we find ourselves working with the pro-human companies building with AI, moving the people around them from skeptics to believers.
What We Build
Services, selected work, case studies, and the clients we have done it with.
Linked scorecards that track investment to result: cost per job created, household energy savings per dollar, acre-feet of water benefit per dollar. Communities and project teams see what is working and where dollars should go next.
Normalizing thousands of tables of public data to surface statistically significant anomalies, delivered as dashboards, alerts, and data-driven stories for city leaders and residents. Live in nine cities.
Helping the companies and communities building with AI earn trust for its pro-human uses, and, when it helps a project move, doing some of the data work behind the system. Applied machine learning at catalog scale on the program that became Climate Pledge Friendly.
Mapping firm power, transmission, and permitting signals to identify where and when to back new energy and infrastructure, built to shorten the path to bringing new SMRs online.
Progress measured entirely from publicly available APIs. No self-reporting, no spin. If the work is real, the public record shows it.
Search, social, content, and conversion funnels engineered to a number: cost per lead, cost per signed account. In 2026, helped a professional services firm increase incoming leads 122% and signed accounts 42%.
Earned media strategy and placement across national, local, and independent channels, including Substack and podcast outreach. Recent placements include The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN, FOX, PBS, the New York Post, and local TV, print, and digital news.
Strategy, organizing, and execution for public campaigns: building the volunteer base, focusing it on the decision that matters, and keeping the pressure on through the endgame. Organized a 30,000-member student network behind the campaign that created Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks.
Assembling unlikely allies, labor, industry, environmental groups, and community organizations, behind one framework they can all win inside. Co-founded the alliance whose clean energy investment framework shaped the federal recovery program.
Documentary, broadcast, and short-form production that makes a project legible and human. Created and hosted an investigative environmental newsmagazine on national television, and produced a decade-long documentary of San Francisco’s independent music scene, recognized by Rolling Stone.
Apps that turn an audience into participants in elections, comment periods, and public hearings. Led product for a late-night comedy show’s companion app that reached the App Store top ten and registered one million voters.
Embedding sustainability in the metrics a company already runs on: assortment, certification, search, and sales. Developed Climate Pledge Friendly, which lifted sales of certified products 12%, and helped launch the sustainability program of the world’s largest retailer.
The hardest part of a big project isn't engineering. It's the moment someone has to say yes without trusting the people asking.
The practice works that moment across the whole arc: stepping into project leadership when a team needs it, sitting with communities to shape assumptions before anything is proposed, building instruments that show whether money becomes outcomes, and making the public case until the people who matter are convinced.
That's how a shopper comes to trust a label, a farm town comes to trust a buildout, and a city comes to trust its own numbers. The craft has held across three decades: make the facts legible, put the community first, and tell the story well enough that it travels on its own.
A mapping of the firm power and transmission gap for the data center buildout through 2050, built to shorten the time it takes to bring new SMRs online. The system scours public permitting and data center announcements to identify opportunities to intervene in support of new energy projects.
Now live in nine cities, normalizing thousands of tables of city data to find 3σ anomalies that give city leaders and residents real management insight, delivered as dashboards, alerts, and stories generated from the data. It began as a tool for San Francisco’s new mayor and has spread from there.
An organizational dashboard for a think tank that measures their progress entirely through publicly available APIs, turning the public record into a live picture of institutional momentum.
A sample of projects. We're happy to share our experience in your field, or to refer you to someone better suited.
Helped Gore find new commercial applications for expanded PTFE (ePTFE), the material family behind GORE-TEX. Mapped where it could win in the outdoor category, opened conversations with commercial buyers, got samples into the hands of scientists and field testers, and produced the packaging and marketing collateral to bring it to market.
Worked with teams at Amazon to use machine learning to assess the environmental impacts of billions of products and feed those signals into core search and ranking. The work became Climate Pledge Friendly.
Helped design and launch the Personal Sustainability Project, a voluntary engagement program that reached more than a million Walmart associates through its architecture, training, and rollout.
Helped launch Worn Wear, Patagonia’s program for repairing, reusing, and reselling its gear, and organized and joined the college tour that brought it to life: a repair truck and crew traveling campus to campus, mending garments on the spot, screening films, and running student-led events that fed into the resale platform.
Helped bring Civil Justice with Sean Collinson, a new court-mediation show, from concept to air. The first series out of Kapital Entertainment’s unscripted and digital division, distributed by Paramount Global and carried on Roku and the CW App.
Co-created Comedy Pays with Cedric the Entertainer, a weekly Instagram comedy contest where creators submit one-minute joke videos for a cash prize. Fifty episodes have reached over 25 million people, with engagement in the top 1% of comedy productions.
Led by Adam Werbach. The throughline across three decades: technology, community engagement, and marketing help ambitious environmental and infrastructure efforts earn public support and get built.
Served as the youngest national president of the Sierra Club, elected at 23. The work included passage of the California Desert Protection Act, which created Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks and the Mojave National Preserve, protecting about 7.6 million acres of desert wilderness.
Founded Act Now Productions, building technology for environmental organizations and producing documentaries on climate.
Co-founded the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, environmental groups, and clean tech companies organized around lowering the cost of clean energy through large-scale investment. The framework later informed the roughly $90 billion clean-energy program in the 2009 Recovery Act.
Served on the global executive board of Saatchi & Saatchi and as CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, serving companies in more than 30 countries. The practice grew out of Act Now’s work helping Walmart launch its sustainability efforts, which spread across Walmart’s supplier base and led to Act Now’s sale to Publicis Groupe. Ran sustainability programs for the retail and energy sectors, with clients including Duke Energy and Vestas Wind alongside finance and municipal work.
Launched Trove, the technology company that manages online and in-store resale programs for brands from Patagonia to REI to Carhartt, still the largest player in branded resale.
Served as Global Head of Sustainable Shopping at Amazon, integrating Whole Foods and sustainability data into the core search algorithm and developing Climate Pledge Friendly.
“Ten billion people are coming regardless. They are a design brief, not a problem.”
Read the essay →One ring a year. It outlives everyone who plants it.
Wind made visible, blade by blade.
Five-fold symmetry, printed by the tide.