I joined Lokalise a few months ago. When I was interviewing, they told me this company was full of ambitious people who move fast. While that was nice to hear, I thought I’d wait to draw my own conclusions. After all, no company claims to be mediocre and slow.
Not long after I started, another new joiner – Chloe Pott in Marketing Operations – organized a group of Lokalisers who were interested in sustainability initiatives. That group got to work, and today we have an announcement:
Lokalise is the first major translation management platform to go carbon neutral.
Ambitious people moving fast, indeed.
What does that mean for you?
If you are a customer or thinking about becoming a customer, it means you have a partner who will help you achieve your carbon reduction goals.
If you are an employee, it means that you work at a company that makes decisions that are both financially sound and uphold its cultural values (more on that below).
If you are thinking about working at Lokalise, it means that we are, in fact, a company that takes the best ideas and quickly turns them into reality. By incorporating advanced software internationalization, we ensure sustainability and efficiency across our localization processes.
If you’re a company in the localization and translation industry, we hope you’ll join us in carbon neutrality soon!
About our leadership and culture
One of our company values is, “Take ownership. Optimize for impact.” This journey to carbon neutrality is just one example of how our team lives our values.
Within weeks, a group spread across nine countries organized their efforts to research the topic, interviewed sustainability experts, and calculated our carbon footprint. The work gave us the confidence to create a plan for a carbon neutral Lokalise, which we pitched to our founders and the rest of the management team.
Many companies make these pledges for 2025 or 2030. The feedback from our pitch was, “Why couldn’t we do this today?” So we did it, today.
In the end, being carbon neutral makes business sense for us. As a localization company, we believe a prosperous world is important to our success. Reducing carbon in the atmosphere is one of our bets that we can do well by doing good.
How are we going to do it?
We’re a global, fully remote company which comes with its own set of opportunities and challenges in terms of carbon neutrality. We talked with a wide variety of experts in the field to help us come up with a viable plan.
Our first step is to opt into the Stripe Climate initiative. This will automatically funnel a percentage of our customers’ purchases into high quality carbon removal projects. The program is appealing because it focuses on helping emerging technologies move down the cost curve. It’s a mindset we understand and can support. Also, not gonna lie, it was easy to do.
But that’s not enough. The projects we contribute to via Stripe have variable costs. That means we can’t predict exactly how much carbon our money will help remove. So, on a quarterly basis, we will calculate our carbon footprint and, if our Stripe commitment falls short, we’ll find other high-quality ways to offset it.
In addition to offsets, we’re starting to reduce our footprint.
- When we travel, we’re encouraging land-based options over flights (air travel emits more than 3x the amount of carbon as a train per unit of distance).
- New employees have always had a budget to set up their home office. Now they can choose to donate a percentage of their budget to planting trees.
- We’re going to institute a preference for vendors that share our commitment to reducing carbon in the atmosphere.
The efforts don’t stop here, but it’s a good start.
My bets on the future
Being with a company that shares my values also helps me with my other bets. I’m an engineer, a manager, an American living in Europe, and a part-time guitar player. I’m also a dad. I’m betting that we can make the world a healthier place for my kids, and for kids everywhere, by taking action.
When I was first approached to work at Lokalise, I saw a highly rated product with momentum. That was interesting. I also saw a fast-growing startup that wanted to make an impact. That was exciting. But to also work at a company that is willing to invest in building a better world for all and attracts people who want to do the same, that’s compelling.
