Quitting for a cause: These visionaries left their jobs for planet-saving careers
Author: Vanessa Glavinskas
When Eugene Kirpichov quit his job at Google in 2020, he shared the good-bye email he’d sent his colleagues on LinkedIn. To his surprise, it went viral. Kirpichov wrote, in part: “The reason I'm leaving is because the scale, urgency and tragedy of climate change are so immense that I can no longer justify to myself working on anything else, no matter how interesting or lucrative, until it's fixed. I'd be lying if I didn't say that I think others, who have the privilege of being able to do so, should follow suit.” “People stad responding to me saying ‘I’m also overwhelmed about the climate crisis,’” he says. “Many asked me to help them figure out how they too could work on finding solutions.” The avalanche of responses made Kirpichov realize that he had a bigger problem to solve than just his own career dissatisfaction. So, with a friend, he stad a Slack channel to bring together the “climate curious” with climate experts. “We thought we’d put these people into a community and let the community do its thing,” he explains. He looked at it as an experiment that would help others while he figured out an idea for a “real start-up.” But as the Slack community, called Work On Climate, grew — and thousands of people found jobs through it — it hit him that, as the global economy becomes more climate conscious, millions of people will need new skills. So he decided to make Work On Climate his full-time job. He continues to grow the start-up into areas beyond networking, advising institutions like universities on how to better prepare the workforce of tomorrow.
“Today, no university would graduate an accountant who doesn’t know how to use a computer,” Kirpichov says. “Tomorrow, no school will graduate an accountant who doesn’t know how to do carbon accounting.”