As part of the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative, in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we’re continuing to highlight women-owned businesses, their solutions, and their journeys growing their business on the marketplace during each week of Women’s History Month in March. In this week’s edition of the series, Microsoft’s Gena Goh sits down with Earth Knowledge’s Julia Armstrong D’Agnese to hear their story and partner journey.
About Gena: Gena Goh is the Partner Advisory & Inclusive Growth Senior Strategy Lead with the Global Partner Solutions business at Microsoft. She focuses on developing strategies that enable partners to innovate and build solutions toward a more inclusive economy, including leading the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative. Gena is also a professionally trained Co-Active coach and enjoys helping people and organizations chart new paths to purpose and impact.
About Julia: Julia Armstrong D’Agnese is an innovator and change-maker and as Earth Knowledge CEO drives strategic partnerships and big-picture transformational opportunities to help build a more sustainable world. She uses her ability to gain respect of, and constructively challenge, business and organizational leaders, advocating and driving reinvention through technology and propelling individuals and organizations into new paradigms of thought and operation. Julia works with Fortune 500 company leadership to innovatively become truly sustainable, harnessing global change opportunities and mitigating risks to become more climate resilient and nature positive.
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[GG]: What are the beginnings of Earth Knowledge?
[JAD]: Dr. Frank D’Agnese and I originally co-founded Earth knowledge in 2003. We saw that there was incredible information about the Earth all over the world, a treasure trove of data that we wanted to integrate and then make understandable and actionable. Earth Knowledge looks at all of Earth’s systems and integrates models from the subsurface to the atmosphere, and captures how these systems are interacting, which gives the most accurate information around operation risks, supply chain risks, investment risks and opportunities, etc. This includes soil, geology, water, climate, biodiversity and all types of nature-related systems and more. This holistic systems approach is used in medicine. Take heart disease for example, if someone has heart disease, the first thing we do is blood work, right? Doctors do this to make sure that the other systems in the body are working well before they do heart surgery as it’s the interaction of these systems that can produce cascading risks. And it's the same thing with the Earth.
With the financial and corporate sectors skyrocketing need for “Earth Knowledge” for ESG, climate and nature risk mitigation, we re-incorporated in 2020, and built a Digital Twin of the Earth powered by Microsoft Azure to provide the highest caliber of subscription-based planetary intelligence data and insights. We provide PaaS and SaaS applications of Earth Knowledge Foresight with Power BI. We have technology experts and engineers that advise as we continue to build out our integrated planetary platform.
[GG]: What excites you most about your application and its impact?
[JAD]: Earth Knowledge allows us to define current and future risks at any location on the globe with our Digital Twin of the Earth. By tracking human-planet interactions, we developed indicators that help simplify and measure risks and opportunities for planetary health. These indicators assess things like nature risk, climate risk, drought, water availability, biodiversity, infrastructure risks, all kinds of different risks and opportunities that can then be communicated through the platform. To highlight the impact our platform has, the State of California Climatologist depends on the Earth Knowledge platform for monthly models to make decisions around drought, water availability, water supply, infrastructure risk, etc., and one of the Fortune 500 power companies uses our information to look at their physical assets around the world to see where they may have climate risks which they need to be aware of and mitigate.
[GG]: Can you share more about your background and what drives your changemaking?
[JAD]: I come from a family that have always been entrepreneurs, all the way back to the first glass factory in the colonies. So for me, I grew up asking myself, “how can I change the world?” In my 20s, I was in management and helped a company scale from being in trailers to going public. Then I had my own business advising others on building successful organizations, companies, careers, etc. I also was a Managing Partner at a VC. When we created Earth Knowledge, I realized there's brilliant scientific information all over the world, but nothing's going to change unless we can make it understandable and actionable. We were inspired to create a way with this big data platform that could integrate this information and also communicate it in a way that people can actually act on it to change the world.
[GG]: What have been some of the highlights of partnering with Microsoft?
[JAD]: Our partnership with Microsoft is three levels. One is working technically with engineers that help us continue to build out our Earth Knowledge Foresight platform. The second is with our coselling process with Microsoft, which is phenomenally effective and very important. We’re now a part of an assisted growth program for co-selling, which includes resources for women-owned businesses within the group. Third is thought leadership. Earth Knowledge collaborated with Ernst & Young and Microsoft to coauthor a report directed at the financial sector called “Waking up to nature, the biodiversity imperative for financial services.”
Bringing Earth Knowledge to the ESG and sustainability market aligned with the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative, has definitely been an instrumental component of our partnership. Through the initiative, we’ve had multiple opportunities to be featured as a Climate and Sustainability partner and to share our story and message through blogs, videos, and panel discussions. We were also introduced to a terrific community organization “Women in Cloud.” And I was recently selected as one of their Top 100 Women Founders in 2023. These are all connections facilitated by Microsoft that have come from our #BuildFor2030 engagements.
[GG]: Expanding on your involvement with #BuildFor2030, why is it important for more companies to support the UN SDGs?
[JAD]: Building a more sustainable world and highly successful company can go hand in hand. #BuildFor2030 is an outstanding initiative that empowers this. It also parallels Fortune 500 companies’ work to become more sustainable, increase their ESG ratings, build climate resilient and nature positive operations, supply chains and investments. ESG assets are to reach $53T by 2025, younger generations want to wear brands and invest in truly sustainable companies. Our customers are excited that Earth Knowledge is a Climate and Sustainability Partner with #BuildFor2030, and empowered as they accelerate their own journey to become authentically more sustainable.
[GG]: What advice would you give to other women looking to build and scale their tech innovations?
[JAD]: When you're disrupting the market, you have to expect that others may try to undermine your ideas. They'll be resistant to change. Amazing people who have changed the world had to weather years of this. We were way ahead of the market and often heard, “You must be a nonprofit; corporations don’t need Earth Knowledge.” When we were creating the Digital Twin of the Earth, investors would say, “This is too big. Why don't you just do climate tech or water or ag tech?” and we'd say, well, we need to replicate how the Earth actually works because that's the only way you can make the most accurate decisions. Now the market is ready. The corporations aware of how critical it is to mitigate climate risk are now also aware of nature risk, and vice versa. Earth Knowledge has always integrated both with our system of systems approach.
It takes tremendous courage and faith to innovate. It’s very important for entrepreneurs to have mentors and a very strong support system who believe in them and can help them stay strong to build a highly successful company and change the world.
[GG]: What are you most proud of in your journey building Earth Knowledge? What’s next?
[JAD]: I’m most proud that we have stayed true to our mission and vision despite substantial obstacles and have built a global network of incredible people who support Earth Knowledge, our Earth systems approach, culture, mission, and opportunity to help build a more sustainable world. As nature risk is finally getting recognized by businesses as a vital area to mitigate, as well as climate and other risks, Earth Knowledge is scaling massively to get our authoritative data and insights to them to drive exponential change at scale. This is what we have been waiting for: businesses that had been driving the problems now are realizing that they are key to healing our precious Planet, and that we can be mutually committed to People, Planet and Profits. This is our vision coming true.
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Have questions for Julia or Gena? Comment below to continue the conversation!
Resources:
- Join our community event, "Grow with the marketplace built for inclusion, innovation, and impact" on April 19, 8am-11am (PST)
- Join the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative, a call-to-action for Microsoft partners to drive changemaking, innovation, and collective impact, to help advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Hear our partners’ perspective on participating.
- Attest as a women-owned business in Partner Center and be discovered on the marketplace.
- Learn more and engage with community organizations such as Women in Cloud and The WIT Network.
- Join ISV Success program.