FEATURE INTERVIEW
A serial entrepreneur with a conscience Rebecca Harcourt interviews Eric Ralls, founder and CEO of PlantSnap
A self-confessed science nerd and nature lover, Eric Ralls developed the app PlantSnap with the goal of reconnecting people to the world around them. I recently caught up with Eric via Zoom at his home in the US to find out more about him, the app and the partnership between PlantSnap and BGANZ. Eric, how did your journey begin? I grew up in East Texas in an oil and real estate family.
Eric Ralls. Photo: PlantSnap.
I’m a long way from home now, both geographically and ideologically. I live in a little ski town in the southwest corner of Colorado. I escaped East Texas to Nashville where I studied Japanese and psychology and then went to grad school in Arizona to study business. Back then Japan was doing well, and I had a Walkman and a Sega console. In hindsight, I think I should have learned Chinese! I got out of grad school and discovered the Internet. It was the early days of the Internet. I was really interested in space and the universe at that time. There was no website about space, so I decided to build one, called Cosmiverse. It was 1999 and that was my first Internet company. It was just a big media portal, with a bunch of writers. You went to Cosmiverse to read about space like you go to CNN or News Online to read about politics and showbiz. It was fun, and successful, and I realised that I could do my job from anywhere in the world. My job was learning about things that interested me and teaching people what I had learned, and I loved it. My aim has always been to get people to understand science by making it easy and fun to learn. With my current website, earth.com, there’s six million pages of content, one for every plant and animal species on the planet. We also publish about 10 news articles every day about earth, nature and the environment. This is the only earth we’ve got, and we’re not taking care of it. 6
THE BOTANIC GARDENer | ISS 55 SUMMER 2020/21
