What future will the boldest aspire to build?

One carbon-removal company hires with a case study. Candidates get three sentences and are asked to turn them into a 30-minute presentation. The ones it hires were told the task would take three hours and spent the whole weekend on it, because they could not let go. The founder described the test at a Ripple where Anna Ottosson and Jonny Everett had come to air a worry. The smartest people, they feared, no longer want to build in climate. When they asked who thought more people were excited to build in climate in 2022 and 2023 than today, hands went up. The founder's stayed down.

The pull of AI

Anna lives in Stockholm, where many people are building or joining AI start-ups such as Lovable, and few of Anna's friends who want to work in start-ups think about climate at all. Jonny said the pull reaches the most senior people. A former boss of Jonny's recently left an important post in UK research and government for Anthropic. And AI has an impact story of its own, since many in the field believe they are building AGI to save the world.

The pay gap is old, Anna said. A large AI company can pay five times what a start-up can, just as Google or a big corporate once could, and start-ups used to answer with a bigger role in a smaller pond. Now an eight-person start-up in Stockholm can offer a large salary, years of runway, a fine office and a fun culture. "What's left for us to compete with?" Anna asked. Impact, perhaps.

You can make your dent on the universe here, or you can be a little cog, a well-paid little cog in that machine.

What still recruits

The founders at the table were less gloomy. The carbon-removal founder's staff come from oil and gas, commodities trading and finance because they want to do something that matters, and most who have left went on to other work in the sector. Engineers and scientists, the founder said, become obsessed with a problem and want to work on something physical. A biotech founder said start-ups have always lost on pay, and recalled competing with Google for software developers at a first company. Whether a candidate turns down £200,000 or £500,000, the pitch is the one start-ups always made, about meaning, ownership and impact. "You can make your dent on the universe here, or you can be a little cog, a well-paid little cog in that machine," the founder said. One of the hosts replied that what has changed is the size of venture, with multi-billion-dollar funds and a long tail of well-funded AI companies bidding for the same people.

A founder who came from robotics and space said a founder must be the most unreasonably ambitious person recruits have ever met. People who join from other sectors do not think about impact at first. Before long they are the ones pitching it.

Others added what keeps people once they arrive. One participant cited the founder of Planted, who says people come for impact and stay for culture, and the founder of Proton, for whom the main retention strategy is winning. An investor said the end goal must be big enough that ownership in a very profitable company outweighs an AI salary. That answers a path the hosts had seen appeal to many AI founders, in effective altruism circles and elsewhere, of getting rich in AI and then giving the money away.

Some untapped talent is senior. A founder whose company trades batteries for recycling hired a former senior oil executive who, driven by guilt, took a 95% pay cut to spend the last years of a career on something impactful. Some is young. A publicly funded Swedish project presented a vision of a regenerative food system to 500 students at two universities, and 95% of them wanted a job in the sector.

A fearful story and a hopeful one

Attention was the harder problem. One speaker noted that a hot summer produced headlines about disposable barbecues while AI filled the news, and that even this community has stopped saying the word climate or talking about gigatons. Others saw strength in the shift. Start-ups that sell on cost, efficiency and risk have found doors opening with customers, and a climate researcher pointed out that solar and wind won on the cost of electricity, not on carbon. Losing the word, the researcher said, is a sign of a maturing market.

The opening, one participant said, is that AI's own story has turned fearful. It used to promise to cure cancer. Now the message is that it is happening, it is us or China, and you catch the train or you do not. That leaves climate free to offer a positive vision of the future and invite people to build it. Another participant was less sure, having watched talented people go into AI believing it will solve food and water. They are allies, someone replied, because AI is a tool.

Anna came away more optimistic than at the start. One participant, who still felt climate was cool, had a simpler forecast. The fundamentals have not changed, they said. Wait for the AI cycle to run its course, as the climate cycle did, and ask again in three years.

This Ripple was hosted by Anna Ottosson (Mudcake) and Jonny Everett (Marble) at The Drop 2026 on 16 September.