Modern CTO Why Regenerative Tech Needs to be the Future with Tom Chi, Google X Founder & author of Climate Capital
Mar 12, 2026
Tom Chi, Google X co-founder and clean-tech inventor, and author of Climate Capital. He discusses targeting the 30 industries causing most planetary harm and intercepting pollution at production. He explains factory-led construction, cobotics, and why profitable physical technologies scale. He outlines At One’s hands-on investing that prizes unit economics over performative green.
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Solve Pollution At Low Entropy Points
- Target the lowest-entropy point in a lifecycle to solve environmental problems effectively.
- Tom Chi explains intercepting plastic production at a few hundred extruder nozzles is far easier than cleaning microplastics in oceans.
Change Production Not Cleanup
- Change core industrial production rather than cleaning up waste afterwards to scale impact.
- Chi advises redesigning materials or extrusion processes so damage never gets produced at source.
Winning Unit Economics Capture Whole Markets
- Physical industries tend to converge on one or two winning unit economics, so a superior physical solution can capture an entire market.
- Chi contrasts this with discretionary software choices like Asana vs Slack.
