George Dy - Entrepreneur, PM, Designer in Oakland, CA

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On Building the Future

Hey again, sorry it's been so long! It's been over a year since I've written anything substantial, and probably even longer since I was writing at a normal cadence. At the beginning of my writing challenge in 2021, I was excited about the idea of writing something every day, inspired by folks like Seth Godin and Fred Wilson, who’ve effortlessly kept up the habit of writing bite sized pieces of wisdom every day. As time went on, my dailies turn into weeklies, and then into biweeklies, and eventually I just couldn’t keep up with the quantity or quality. My writing got longer and not necessarily better, but I still loved doing the research portion of writing, which drives me to write today. All this to say…

I’m starting again, but this time with a little more format and structure. Not only do I expect to achieve better consistency in my posts, but it’ll also help to guide my research and writing toward expected breakdowns and learnings that you can look forward to.

In this new series featuring the ideas and companies that give us hope for a future of cleaner buildings and cities, although the subject may change, I’ll still talk about the climate science, how it impacts you, and how you can contribute.

Build the Future

My goal with this newsletter is to learn in public about the ideas, concepts, and companies that give us hope for a future where our built environment makes us healthier, not sicker. I’ll explore the promises of climate impact, the science, how it impacts you, and how you might get involved.

Over the past few years, I’ve obsessed over a wide spectrum of topics, but my subjects would always meander back to the intersection of the built environment and public health. Through past businesses, volunteer work and pure personal interest, I’ve developed deep expertise in building electrification — the history, the solutions, the headwinds, and the companies that are leading the charge. And excitingly, it seems like each day there’s someone new entering the arena, trying to make our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities safer, cleaner, and more resilient. I want to use this platform to learn with you and share my thoughts on the science, the impact, and perhaps even ways they could improve.

To that end, this newsletter will help me:

  1. Deep dive into new tech, services, and policies at the intersection of climate x buildings

  2. Teach you what I’ve learned

  3. (Hopefully) Learn from you about your perspective on the subjects I cover or if there’s any that I’ve missed

And with that, a quote from a Christopher Alexander:

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Cheers 🥂


This post was originally published at https://build.substack.com on March 15, 2023.