Air-powered planes flying into the next decade
Small Steps Vol. 68: Giant Leap 2022 wrap 🌯; floating on air-powered planes 🛫; and open-sourced circular solutions 🌏.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead, Cultural Anthropologist
So long, 2022
🫶 As we close out the year, we want to thank YOU, our incredible audience of readers waiting with bated breath every second Thursday for some of that good impact content. You give us so much energy and optimism.
We’re signing off for 2022, but we’ll be back early next year with more impact stories that inspire or make us laugh. For all the thrills and spills, check out this recap of Giant Leap’s 2022.
What we’re thinking about
🛫 Floating on air. “Air-powered planes” sounds like an oxymoron but it could be the guilt-free way to fly internationally within 10 years. Aviation is responsible for up to 3.5% of global emissions and there are no easy solutions (battery power won’t get you far, and hydrogen is a bit too explosive). Enter Sustainable Aviation Fuels (or “SAFs” to their friends) that are typically made from biofuels (i.e. organic materials) or, following a new wave of air capture technology, from combining hydrogen and airborne CO2 to produce fuels (great primer from World Fund).
These “electrofuels” could be the carbon neutral alternative to decarbonise the industry, with emphasis on neutral as they do release the captured atmospheric CO2 to power flight. However, more work needs to be done on cost (SAFs are still 2-3x more expensive than standard fuels) and design of aeroplanes to reduce vapour trails, which are understood to have a global warming potential more than 2x greater than CO2.
🌏 Open sourced circularity. “Diversity of thought makes us stronger, not weaker. Without diversity, we die off as a species. We can no longer adapt to changes in the environment. We need each other to survive.” Farnam Street wrote this worthy reminder that we move faster, better, and more creatively with more diverse brains on the problem.
This is especially true for our most complex problems, like creating a regenerative circular economy in service to human wellbeing. That’s why we loved this dive into some open sourced solutions to build a circular economy using the collective expertise of diverse people, including WikiHouse providing free blueprints for sustainable house designs from thousands of designers globally, and Materiom that crowdsources recipes for sustainable packaging materials that you can make in your kitchen. People are amazing.
New paths
🧠 Applied is on the hunt for an Account Executive.
💰 Perx Health is seeking a Finance Manager
👩🏽💼 Amber is trying to find a Senior Data Engineer.
💻 Work180 is looking for a Diversity Equity and Inclusion Lead.
🔥 Also, check out our Giant Leap Fund jobs board for over 80+ available positions or fill out our expression of interest form. There’s even more jobs at ethical companies on the global B-Work job board.
Giant leaps
✈️ Swoop Aero was featured in Techcrunch announcing its 20,000th flight and a $1.5m contract with USAID.
🙌 Evrnu has teamed up with global fashion giant Zara to release a new line of recycled fashion.
💄Conserving Beauty has been named a State Finalist in the Telstra Business Awards.
🎙️Our Managing Director Will Richardson featured in the Shape The System podcast, which recently celebrated its third anniversary.
For the road
🗺️ An open-source climate finance tracker. The tool, being developed by a conglomerate of US tech companies, is aiming to map who is funding what within the climate tech ecosystem.
🏥Tracking the rise of consumer health. A16Z shared this breakdown of the state of consumer health and opportunities that are set to arise from things like inefficient service matching, underserved markets like obesity, and gamified wellbeing.
👨🏻⚕️Healthtech isn’t recession proof. Former healthtech exec Jordan Teicher recounts how he joined an exciting healthtech company, only to be made redundant a year later. He found that unlike healthcare, healthtech is very much at the whims of the market and its risk averse clients in the health sector.
👨💻 The Microsoft Excel World Cup. Are you a slayer of spreadsheets? A fan of functions? Then watch the recap of the Excel World Cup (or read the madness in the Atlantic). The competition is essentially a live puzzle, where competitors use Microsoft Excel to answer a series of increasingly difficult questions.
👶 Everyone in South Korea is about to be younger. That’s thanks to a change in how South Korea considers the age of its population. Unlike other countries, South Korea determines age not by birthday, but by birth-year, ticking everyone’s age up by a year following New Years Eve. This created all sorts of issues for aged-based regulations, such as the drinking and driving age, and will be rectified by June next year.
🍾 VC Wrapped. Spotify is not the only one who can summarise a year in a flashy slideshow.
🏎️ Hot, hot, hot. Everybody is going bonkers over ChatGPT, while this person is casually making a hadron collider from hot wheels.
🫘 So long, and thanks for all the beans. Found a reddit page dedicated to things you can (but shouldn’t) fill with baked beans. Kind of wish we didn’t, though it did lead us to this video of someone filling their computer with beans and then taking it to (the world’s nicest) repairperson. Is this how 2022 ends??