Week 980

Matt Kirkland

It's week 980!

This week I am inspired afresh by Make Sunsets, a climate startup that is working on high-altitude particle injection - effectively spreading harmless particulates in the wayyyyy upper atmosphere, to reflect solar radiation and thus combat global warming. It's a high-impact way that can buy us time as we transition to cleaner energy sources. This is one of the first mitigation projects in Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Ministry for the Future', and yes, it sounds crazy, it definitely is controversial.

But more importantly here, I'm inspired by their monthly updates. This weeknote thing is an exercise in thinking through how to talk about what BNB does, and Make Sunsets puts out a monthly email where they start out with their revenue, burn rate, cash on hand, and runway calculations. Then the recap what they've done that month, and set out targets for next month. Their 'what we've done this month' is usually very impressive, like 'We tested our drone that captures telemetry flight data from the balloon and autonomously flies home to base from the stratosphere'.

We work on a dozen different projects every WEEK, so we don't have that singular focus that MS does. Maybe the key here is to just go deeper into explaining more about any one of our exciting projects? Like: how we're crafting a user to AI to print media pipeline for one client. Or how we're helping our ecomm clients deal with the tariff craziness. Or how we're doing discovery work on a scheduling tool that will help field agents spend more time doing their job and less time driving to the wrong place.

Or maybe we should get into high-altitude drones?