Marco Ciappelli interviews Tom Chi, Google X Founding Member, Inventor & Venture Capitalist, Author of Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, for An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast.
What if the economy isn't broken — just badly designed? Tom Chi, Google X founding member, inventor of 77 patents, and venture capitalist at At One Ventures, joined me on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age to discuss his new book Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future. From the streets of Florence to the strip malls of Silicon Valley, from the mechanics of attention capture to the physics of ecological economics, this conversation goes far beyond climate. It's about how we design the systems we live inside — and whether we have the will to redesign them before it's too late.
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Tom Chi has worked on things that changed the world. Microsoft Office. Web search. The self-driving car. Google Glass. He'll tell you himself that not all of them were hits, and he's fine with that — that's what it means to be an inventor. But what he's working on now is different in scale from anything before. Not a product. Not a platform. A redesign of the global economy.
His new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, starts from a premise that sounds radical until you think about it for more than a few minutes: economics is a design discipline. And right now, it's poorly designed. Not maliciously — poorly. We built systems optimized for short-term capital extraction, and we're living with the consequences. The question Tom is asking is whether we can redesign them before those consequences become irreversible.
He didn't get there through ideology. He got there through Florence.
Tom was auditing sustainable MBA courses alongside his partner when he was invited to a conference in Italy. He landed, got a day off, wandered the streets — and something clicked. The entire city is built from sustainable materials. And it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. That moment demolished an assumption he didn't even know he was carrying: that sustainable living means downgrading. Florence is a 2,000-year-old counterexample to every joke about Birkenstocks and cold showers. We knew how to do this. We just forgot.
Which brings us to the first big thread of our conversation: the pattern of forgetting. We talked about this in the context of technology, not history. Specifically, how the shift from software you paid for to software supported by advertising quietly changed everything. When you pay for a tool, the goal is to make it better. When the tool is supported by advertisers, the goal is to keep you inside it as long as possible. Clippy used to annoy us because it interrupted our train of thought. Now interrupting our train of thought is the entire business model.
Tom has a phrase for what's happening at scale: cognitive despoiling. We spent the 20th century strip mining the physical resources of the planet. We're spending the 21st century strip mining the cognitive resources of humanity. There's a finite number of coherent thoughts this civilization can produce. And we're burning through them — with misinformation, amygdala triggers, and dopamine loops — the same way we burned through forests and waterways. The damage is invisible because it's underwater, like ocean trawling. But it's real. And it compounds across generations.
This is where I had to push back a little. Because I grew up in Florence. I made the jump to digital. I love my vinyls and I love my streaming library. I'm part of the contradiction he's describing. And I asked him: given all this, where do you even start?
His answer is the most practical thing I've heard in a long time. Start with physical businesses. The ones actually causing most of the damage — to water, soil, air, biodiversity. And here's the part that almost nobody is talking about: 90% of the cost structure of a physical business already aligns ecological and economic goals. Fewer raw materials used means lower feedstock costs and less extraction. Less energy consumed means lower processing costs and fewer emissions. Shorter supply chains mean lower logistics costs and fewer transport emissions. The economy and the ecology are already pointing the same direction on 90% of what matters. The 5% that isn't aligned — pollution — is what the lobbyists fight about. So that's what dominates the news. And that's why we think this is harder than it is.
Tom's firm, At One Ventures, is built around this insight. They invest in what he calls the triad: disruptive deep tech that delivers radically better unit economics and radically better environmental outcomes at the same time. Their portfolio companies don't sell sustainability. They sell efficiency. The ecological benefit is baked in by design. The customers buy it because it's cheaper and better. The planet wins as a side effect.
That's the book. Part toolkit, part framework, part demonstration that the future we need is already technically possible. The Four C's — critical thinking, creativity, compassion, community — are the human skills that will matter most as AI and robotics take over the rest. And the Three Epochs of Ecological Technology are the roadmap from the economy we have to the one that could actually last.
I don't know if we'll get there in time. Neither does Tom. But I left this conversation thinking something I don't think often enough: the design problem is solvable. We just have to decide we want to solve it.
Climate Capital is out now from Wiley. Link below. And if this is the kind of conversation you come here for — subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com.
— Marco
Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍
____________ About Marco
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age.
___________ About the Guest
About the Guest
Tom Chi is a lifelong technologist, inventor, and Google X founding member who contributed to Google Glass, the Waymo self-driving car, and Project Loon. He holds degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University, is a named inventor on 77 patents, and has held executive roles at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. After Google, he mentored 200+ entrepreneurs on global development challenges before professionalizing his investment work at Hack VC and Crosslink Capital. He is now Managing Partner at At One Ventures, a venture firm with a mission to help humanity become a net positive to nature. Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future (Wiley, February 2026) is his first book.
In this episode of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, Marco Ciappelli sits down with Tom Chi — Google X founding member, 77-patent inventor, and Managing Partner at At One Ventures — on the occasion of his new book Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future (Wiley, February 2026). The conversation moves fluidly from Tom's career building world-changing products at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, to the Florence epiphany that convinced him sustainable design doesn't mean sacrifice, to the mechanics of how ad-supported technology hijacked human attention, to a rigorous, physics-grounded framework for redesigning the global economy around nature rather than against it. Tom introduces the Three Epochs of Ecological Technology as a roadmap from our current extractive economy to one that actively regenerates the planet, and the Four C's — critical thinking, creativity, compassion, community — as the irreducibly human skills that will define success in the century ahead. The episode ends with a sobering but actionable diagnosis: we spent the 20th century strip mining the physical resources of the planet, and we are spending the 21st century strip mining its cognitive resources. The design problem, Tom argues, is solvable. The question is whether we have the will to solve it.
3 Quotes — Tom Chi
"I landed in Florence and within the first 10 or 15 minutes I realized the whole thing is made of sustainable materials. And not only that — it's beautiful. Like, the entire thing is beautiful. I'm like, oh gosh, we actually did know how to do it. At some point we just kind of forgot."
"We spent most of the 20th century learning how to clear cut and strip mine the physical resources of the planet. It looks like we're on track in the 21st century to spend most of it strip mining the cognitive resources of the planet. There's a finite number of coherent thoughts that this civilization could have in its lifetime. That is a finite, exploitable resource."
"90% of the cost structure of physical businesses are fully aligned — where economy and ecology are actually pointed in the same direction. The things that are already aligned don't get discussed politically, because business just gets to business. It's only the 5% that isn't aligned that ends up in the news and in the lobbying. And that's why we have this completely wrong picture of the trade-offs."
3 Quotes — Marco Ciappelli
"Technology has been going extremely fast — way faster than any time in history. But our brain isn't really going that fast. We are still very much reacting to phenomena and emotions that are engraved in our DNA. And I'm not sure we're using technology in the interest of humanity."
"I feel like in a lot of the conversation about climate, when change seems so far away and so much needs to happen, people aren't moving easily. It's almost like there is too much — I'm freaking out, I'm going back to the way I used to know. And unfortunately we're seeing politics right now that are actually reversing the steps we were making."
"It's kind of weird to end up in a conversation about cognitive strip mining when we started talking about climate capital. But we started with technology, we started with social media, we started with things you were proud of or not proud of — and I'm afraid that's one of the reasons the media became entertainment. And we are the ones losing."