By 2019, Nan Ransohoff had held roles at Opower, Uber, and Nuro, building products that shape how people live and move each day. But then her career took a decisive turn. After reading a report highlighting the massive need for carbon removal, she became, in her words, “obsessed” with the topic. Upon further research, Nan realized that, unlike clean energy, carbon removal lacks intrinsic value for end buyers, making it difficult to build a market that could help spur innovation. “The more I learned, the more I felt an increasingly urgent need to do something,” she recalls.
In 2020, Nan became head of climate at Stripe, where she leads the company’s initiatives to support promising permanent carbon removal technologies and help businesses easily fund them. Determined to drive results at an even greater scale, in 2022 she spearheaded the creation of Frontier, launched with Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability. Frontier is a billion-dollar advance-market commitment to permanent carbon removal between 2022 and 2030, designed to help guarantee future demand. Under Nan’s leadership, Frontier backs a portfolio of 50 innovative projects and has contracted 1.7 million tons of durable carbon removal to date. “Nan’s groundbreaking work around finding models for carbon capture and sequestration is genuinely changing the world,” says Jennifer Thomas, MBA ’15.
Beyond her work at Stripe and Frontier, Nan serves as an advisor to multiple tech companies and as a board member for the Institute for Carbon Management at UCLA and the Carbon Removal Alliance. In her online writings, she enjoys sharing her thoughts on everything from carbon removal to art. In a recent post, for example, she reflects on the pivot she made more than five years ago — a move that brought her career path into alignment with her personal vision for a better world. “The ability to formulate bold, creative perspectives on what’s possible helps us raise our collective aspirations and increases the likelihood we might actually achieve them,” she writes.
