Treepoints is the Netflix of carbon offsetting

They knew they wanted to do something to tackle climate change and so Anthony and Jacob created a subscription service for offsetting your carbon footprint, writes Andy Martin

Jacob Wedderburn Day and Anthony Collias, right (Treepoints)

It has become a badge of honour among high-flying tech entrepreneurs to be college dropouts. Anthony Collias and Jacob Wedderburn-Day are the exception. They first put their heads together at Oxford, both completed their degrees at Keble College, and yet despite this obvious excess of education have gone on to become co-founders of Treepoints, a carbon off-setting platform that looks set to become the Netflix of climate-amelioration.

Jacob was brought up in Kent while Anthony roamed around from Istanbul to Dubai to Holland. But their paths finally crossed amid dreaming spires, the Bodleian Library, and lectures on economics. In 2015, equipped with their Oxford degrees, having failed to either drop out or get booted out, they walked straight into internships with big investment institutions before saying to themselves, “This sucks!” as Anthony puts it. “We’ve got to do our own thing.”

At least they got to drop out of investment banking. Anthony found a flat in King’s Cross and Jacob started a masters course at UCL. They had a lot of their old friends turning up and couch-surfing as they passed through London and, annoyingly, stashing their luggage. But they were also planting a seed, which grew into a start-up project for a competition and in 2017 became Stasher: a luggage storage network that means you can leave your stuff somewhere safely and cheaply and not have to lug it around – and especially not dump it on Jacob or Anthony.