Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Fri, 15 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/399-How-to-Pitch-Terraset-and-other-carbon-removal-buyersw-Taylor-Insley--Terraset-e3jd1gr

TL;DR

  • Taylor Insley (Terraset) says ~75% of developer interactions at Carbon Unbound are bad pitches — ambush style, no social grace. Believable and useful.
  • Terraset claims 6-8x leverage per dollar deployed via its revolving fund model. First time I’ve seen that ratio cited publicly for them.
  • Terraset gets ~450 projects in its intake pipeline against a team of three. Diligence bandwidth is the binding constraint, not capital appetite.
  • Insley’s actual advice: relationship-building beats first-impression perfection; she discounts bad early pitches if the project matures.
  • Ross’s “minor leagues” framing — Milky Wire/Terraset before Frontier/Microsoft — is the most operationally useful frame in the episode.

Episode link. Ross Kenyon interviews Taylor Insley, Director of Strategic Growth at Terraset, the tax-deductible philanthropic CDR buyer. The episode is essentially a sales-craft conversation for developers pitching small-to-mid catalytic buyers, anchored on a Carbon Unbound Vancouver panel Insley did earlier this year. There’s also a long Ross monologue on status and in-group dynamics that you can safely skip.

What’s actually worth knowing. Two numbers carry the episode. First, Terraset reports 6-8x leverage per dollar via its revolving fund — meaning every philanthropic dollar mobilizes roughly that much additional capital downstream. Insley frames this as catalytic-first, story-second, though Ross correctly needles her that “catalytic” is the story being sold to donors. Second, 450 applications against a 3-person team. That ratio explains why she values warm intros and ecosystem credibility — not as gatekeeping, but as triage. If you’ve already cleared diligence at Milky Wire or a similar catalytic buyer, you move up the queue.

The more practical takeaway is Insley’s stance on bad pitches: “I don’t take first impressions that seriously.” Projects evolve every 4-6 months, and she’d rather know who’s in the ecosystem early than penalize a rough November pitch when you’ll be a different company by May. That’s a meaningfully different posture from how developers seem to behave — treating each buyer interaction as one-shot. She also flags, accurately, that counter-signaling (“we’re too busy doing science to make a deck”) still happens and still doesn’t work. Hire a designer.

Adjacent context. Terraset’s pitch — tax-deductible donations routed to durable CDR pre-purchases — sits in the same catalytic-buyer cluster as Milky Wire’s Climate Transformation Fund and Stripe-incubated Frontier, but with retail/HNW donor flows rather than corporate offtake budgets. The 6-8x leverage figure is the kind of claim that deserves a methodology write-up; I haven’t seen one published. For developers thinking about how to sequence buyers, Ross’s “minor leagues → majors” framing (Milky Wire/Terraset stamp → Frontier/Microsoft RFP) matches what I’ve observed in practice and is worth internalizing if you’re early-stage and tempted to skip straight to the hyperscalers.

Who should listen. Developers fundraising in the sub-$5M catalytic tier, especially anyone planning to be at Carbon Unbound. Skip if you’re senior commercial — the substance is in the TL;DR above and you already know it.