Jonathan Goldberg - Capturing Carbon - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 25]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:46)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:12)
My guest today is Jonathan Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Carbon Direct, a company focused on advising and investing in carbon removal at scale.
Jonathan started his career in the commodities division of Goldman Sachs and then went on to start a commodity hedge fund, BBL Commodities.
In our conversation, we covered the state of the carbon problem today, the importance of global carbon standards and carbon taxes, and the future of carbon capture and removal technologies. This was a masterclass on all things carbon related. Please enjoy my conversation with Jonathan Goldberg.
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So John, we've been trying to do this for a long time. I'm so jacked to do it with you finally. You've taught me most of what I know about the topics that we're going to cover today. I think an interesting place to begin would be with setting up why you're such an interesting person to be attacking this topic and this problem with your career and with this conversation today. Give us just a thumbnail sketch of the major stops of your career and then I'll probably ask some follow-up questions on each just so we can lay good groundwork to then talk all things carbon.

**Jonathan Goldberg** (3:52)
Yeah, Patrick, thanks so much for having me here. My career actually started a bit off course. I think as many of your guests do, I in school had fancies of becoming a writer. I worked at Reuters and they randomly put me in the commodities group to cover energy markets. I hadn't requested that. It just happened that three people quit the summer that I joined that job. This may tell you a little bit about the quality of work at the time, but I got to publish about 50 articles on energy markets that were distributed. I think I was 18 years old at the time and knew absolutely nothing about what I was writing about. But to get able to get some coverage and got pretty hooked on global commodity markets, why they were important, the geopolitics that goes into it, especially energy markets.