🌱 If this conversation resonated, the GrowGood Playbook goes deeper.

Field-tested insights from every episode: https://sowgoodtogrowgood.substack.com/

A company walks into a meeting claiming zero emissions. Abhinav Kaushal tells them that's not possible. They push back. He shows them the data. Scope 1 is clean. Scope 2 and 3 are not. For the first time, they can see exactly where their impact is coming from.

Abhinav is the founder and CEO of Zero Carbon One, a climate tech platform automating ESG reporting and decarbonization across six continents. In 18 months, he bootstrapped a team of 27 and reached nearly $500K in annual revenue. This conversation is about what happens when awareness finally becomes action.

"You cannot manage what you cannot measure. For the first time they are able to see what is their negative impact on the emission part, which they are denying before we walk into the room." - Abhinav Kaushal

🚀 Key Takeaways:

Visibility precedes action: Most enterprises aren't ignoring their emissions. They genuinely can't see them, and that gap is what Zero Carbon One was built to close.

ESG reporting is a $100B productivity problem: Large enterprises spend nearly $100 billion annually on compliance because the process is broken, Excel-driven, and scattered across too many consultants.

Proof unlocks revenue, not just credibility: A jaggery cup company grew 7x not by reducing emissions but by finally having the data to prove what they were already doing right.

Regulation drives behavior more than mission does: The biggest sales friction Abhinav faces isn't skepticism. It's procrastination, because without regulatory urgency, decisions get deferred.

Bootstrapping preserves vision: Abhinav chose not to raise VC funding specifically to stay agile enough to follow what customers actually needed rather than what investors projected.

⏳ Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Abhinav Kaushal and Zero Carbon One

05:32 What Zero Carbon One does and how it works

08:34 Hard to abate sectors and why they matter

13:36 Three ways enterprises capture their emissions data

19:03 Where AI fits into ESG reporting and decarbonization

26:39 Climate change as a slow pandemic

32:05 The jaggery cup company that grew 7x

46:38 The biggest challenge to growing Zero Carbon One

1:01:19 Why Abhinav chose not to take VC funding

1:13:46 Why everyone should care about this problem

🔗 Connect with Abhinav

Website: https://zerocarbon.one/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinav-kaushal-500global/

🎙️ About SowGood to GrowGood: Hosted by John Kane Gonzales, entrepreneur and innovator. We explore how change-makers and innovators are building sustainable systems for a better future, turning ideas into scalable impact.