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Ryan Miller is the VP and GM of Private Markets at Persefoni. We talked to Ryan because carbon accounting is emerging as a key need for companies and funds looking to comply with ESG mandates from their shareholders, strengthen trust and affinity with environmentally-conscious consumers, and get into compliance with guidance from governmental organizations like the SEC.

1. Can you start off by explaining what Persefoni is, the problem you're solving, and some of the core use cases that you're seeing?

2. The introduction of GDPR and CCPA was a big catalyst for companies to build software for security compliance. Was there a similar catalyst for Persefoni and this kind of carbon accounting technology?

3. In other words, you’re thinking that this kind of carbon accounting will go from a cost of doing business to being a driver of value for more businesses?

4. I'm curious to what extent you're seeing that or inklings of that kind of shift happening now. Are there companies in particular that are good examples of this today?

5. What's made this kind of shift slow to emerge? Why haven’t we seen more products and companies espousing their low carbon emissions in the decades since Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth?

6. If you take a Fortune 100 company, who's in charge of making sure that this all happens?

7. It’d be great to understand better how the work of carbon accounting works for companies doing it the old way—how much time and money it takes.

8. Do you imagine a future where even small direct-to-consumer businesses advertising on social media are using their carbon footprint to market themselves to consumers?

9. You charge on a recurring, SaaS basis—what is the basis for customers’ ongoing re-engagement with the product?

10. Who in an organization is touching Persefoni? Who are some of the big personas you have in mind for who's using the product?

11.  How do you think about the positioning of Persefoni with respect to other companies in the space like Measurabl, Watershed, EcoVadis, Sylvera, and Sweep?

12.  How do you think about partnering with other companies? How do you think about partnerships as a win-win for Persefoni?

13.  One thing that I didn't think of is having these two big consultancies as partners is interesting. Because it makes me think of Carta, the cap table management software. They replaced what the lawyers do to a large degree, and they found that instead of hating them for that, lawyers actually loved it because that took that part of their job away. Is that a similar kind of dynamic with consultants, actually liking what you do versus stealing their business?

14.  In five years' time, if everything goes correctly if everything goes right for Persefoni, what does the company look like? What does the world look like?