Startup Spotlight #192: Recoolit

Recoolit's digital technology is solving refrigerant emissions.

Aug 02, 2022

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2 years ago · Frederick Daso

I got the chance to speak with Louis Potok, founder and CEO of Recoolit, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Potok started his career applying behavioral economics to international development and microfinance, then spent 6 years doing machine learning at tech startups. Eventually, he started thinking about the climate crisis more seriously and looking for a way to get involved. In 2019, Potok picked up Project Drawdown, which said that refrigerant emissions were the number one problem. He had never heard of this before, but he got completely obsessed with this issue and how it was massively neglected. After spending months talking to experts, and having a false start in Cambodia, Potok started Recoolit to solve this enormous problem.

Startup Spotlight: Recoolit

Problem: Every air conditioner on the planet is full of refrigerants, superpotent greenhouse gases 2000x worse than CO2 which cause 6% of all climate change (3GT yearly). Meanwhile, companies want to go carbon-neutral but struggle to find high-quality credits.

Market: The voluntary carbon credit market is at $1B, growing 70% YoY and projected to reach $30B by 2030; the compliance market is already >$200B.

Solution: We provide tools and training to AC technicians in emerging markets to collect used refrigerant, and then we destroy it, permanently preventing its climate impact. Every step of the process is tracked on our app, which then generates carbon credits for the avoided emissions which we sell to US companies.

Team: We have a team of 5 in Indonesia, our first market, building out our logistics and doing business development with local partners. Our software team is global and remote, with the first two hires being in the US and Europe.

Recent Success:

Potok: We’ve done a great job building out and supporting our partnerships in Indonesia. From freelance technicians up to the air conditioning industry and large real estate groups, the Indonesian market was quick to see the climate impact of our approach and the value to their brands of adopting sustainable practices at no additional cost. Some of our partners here have even been eagerly reporting on our pilots up to their global parent companies and pushing us to scale up the pilots faster.

We’ve also developed a great relationship with the Indonesian Ministry of Environment: they’re eager to see us succeed and have helped us move fast in a highly regulated space. As a foreign founder, I’ve been limited in my ability to make hands-on contributions in this area, so most of the credit here is due to our amazing team. Overall, Indonesia can be a challenging place to do business, but we’ve made very solid headway here in a short time.

Recent Struggle:

Potok: Any market with gatekeepers is structurally tough for startups, and the voluntary carbon credit market is no exception. It’s hard to ship and iterate based on user feedback because most buyers require you to go through a lengthy 3rd-party certification process before they’ll even talk to you. And if you’re doing something completely unproven you need one of the certifying bodies to approve a whole new methodology, which is even more expensive and time-consuming. The voluntary market overall is growing at 70% per year, which means that these legacy institutions are really struggling to keep up. In response to this, some buyers have been willing to buy without certification after doing their own research, but that’s still fairly rare.

Founder Advice:

Potok: Maximize your surface area and ask people for help! If you’re working on something inspirational – and you must be, or why would you be doing it? – complete strangers will be drawn to you and be surprisingly generous with their time and energy. Especially people who have been around the startup scene for a while, who recognize that starting a company is hard and founders need every bit of support they can get.

I’ve also relied on meeting regularly with other founders in small-group settings: I’m in two different “mastermind” groups that meet monthly to share updates, exchange advice and just generally share the ups and downs of the experience.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Potok: Here are three founders you should check out next!

David Cutler, Founder of Fortuna Cools: Fortuna Cools turns agricultural waste into high-performance insulation.
Olya Irzak, Founder of Frost Methane: Frost Methane mitigates concentrated methane releases.
Dalton Fouts, Founder of ReturnKey: Return Key is pioneering recommerce in SE Asia.

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