Chris TollesCo Founder

United States - Cambridge, Massachusetts

Climate change threatens all humanity. I want to help fix it. I run Yard Stick PBC; we measure soil carbon.

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Yard Stick provides easy, accurate, and affordable quantification of soil carbon stocks. Our mission is to enable gigaton-scale agricultural carbon sequestration via scalable, trustworthy measurement solutions. We are the measurement backbone of soil carbon.

Scientists and farmers alike have known for decades that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric GHGs at gigaton/year scale. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon back - until now. By reducing the cost of statistically-sound and agronomically-legitimate soil carbon measurement by 90%+, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative agriculture and ranching practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer/rancher livelihoods, and combat climate change.

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My jam is science commercialization with a strong brand and customer experience lens. Though formally trained as a designer (RISD undergrad), I now focus on being "the business guy" founding a company alongside awesome technical/scientific co-founders.

Until 2020, I was the CEO and Co-Founder of Sundaily. We made skincare gummies based on peer-reviewed, published, human clinical data. We were acquired by Grove Collaborative in June 2020. I still have a lot of gummies in my basement.

I also mentor a variety of startups in the Boston area and love helping other founders. I'm especially interested in mentorship among underrepresented founder communities (e.g. female and nonbinary, BIPOC, immigrant). If you're a founder wondering if I can help you, please hit me up and let's find out!