CEOTru Social Inc.
Jim is a serial social entrepreneur with three decades experience in tech and four in regenerative design, sustainability and climate. He is co-founder and CEO Tru Social and JLINC Labs, and co-founder of Planetwork.
In May 2000, Planetwork produced the first international conference on global ecology and information technology in San Francisco, which led to the ASN initiative to create a global social network – before Facebook. Jim also funded a key social network patent to keep it in the public domain, resulting in founder’s shares in the Linkedin IPO.
In 2005, he saw we need to remove CO2, invested in, and co-founded, the first US biochar company with the emeritus expert on biomass gasification at NREL, represented biochar at the UNIPCC for 3 years and was a finalist for the Branson Prize to remove 1 Gt of CO2 when he sold the company in 2011.
By 2008, he saw we could not remove CO2 fast enough to avoid heating feedback and heard about Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB). He raised non-profit support for MCB research and co-authored a paper in the preeminent scientific journal PhilTrans in 2014.
Planetwork had also started the ‘user-centric digital identity’ community that pursued an internet data protocol for over a decade. Following the Linkedin IPO, Jim hired the most respected developer and the two had a breakthrough on internet data exchange, filed a patent and formed JLINC.com in April 2015. They had a solution ready for GDPR in May 2018, but EU regulators were slow to move.
In Dec 2018 the UNIPCC announced standard carbon accounting, but needed binding agreements. Jim saw that JLINC could automate both and founded Carbon Path as a CA benefit corporation with both environmental and data covenants in April 2019.
By 2020, it was clear that scientists, journalists and activists in all realms, not just climate, need interconnected networks, and with the whole society rapidly waking up to the social media crisis, the working beta became Tru.net.