I don’t sell trucks. I build databases. Massive ones. The kind that track millions of vehicle owners across the country. For twenty years, I have been a creature of logic, code, and binary certainty. In my world, if something breaks, you debug it. You fix it.
But on December 22, 2016, none of that mattered.
Dawne took her last breath that evening. Our four kids were suddenly motherless. I was suddenly a widower who could write the most complex SQL query on earth but couldn’t figure out how to make the silence in our house stop screaming.
So I did the only thing that had ever quieted the noise in my head: I started digging.
At first, it was mindless escape. I’d leave the screens, the servers, and the code, and drive my truck to the back of our property. I planted in frozen ground. I planted in pouring rain. I planted until my hands blistered and my back gave out, because for those few hours the only thing that existed was dirt, roots, and the next living thing I could put in the earth.
The Engineer's Realization
Somewhere in that mud, the developer in me woke up. I stopped looking at these trees as just "nature" and started seeing them for what they really are: The ultimate technology.
Humanity is spending billions of dollars trying to invent "Carbon Capture" technology. We are building massive, energy-hungry metal fans to suck CO2 out of the sky. As an engineer, I looked at the sapling in my hand and realized: Why are we trying to reinvent the wheel?
Nature already wrote the perfect code 300 million years ago.
- It is 100% Solar Powered: It requires no grid connection.
- It is Self-Replicating: It builds its own replacement hardware (seeds).
- It Stabilizes the Infrastructure: Its root systems prevent the very ground from eroding.
- It has Zero Overhead: It turns waste (carbon) into life-support (oxygen).
It struck me as completely illogical to try to engineer a better solution than the one that was already here. Trees became the only code I trusted anymore. They don’t crash. They don’t become obsolete. They don't require software updates. They just grow.
"We try to build machines to do what a $.50 seedling has been doing for eons. It is illogical to reinvent the wheel when the original design is already perfect."
One night in early 2021, I was back at work, staring at a screen full of millions of vehicle records—my life’s work. Suddenly, the two halves of my life collided.
I realized every single one of those records belongs to a human being who is putting carbon into the air. And every single one of those human beings will, at some point, feel helpless about something. Just like I did.
I had spent years turning my personal grief into literal life in the soil. What if I built a bridge between the thing I knew best (Data) and the perfect technology that had saved me (Trees)?
That night, HeartPlanted was born.
We took the database I spent two decades perfecting and added one simple field: “Carbon-offset trees planted on this owner’s behalf.” Now, real money moves from the automotive world I understand into the dirt I now love.
Grief taught me how to plant trees. Love taught me how to plant forests. And logic taught me that the best way to save the future is to trust the technology that built the past.
Do your part. We’ll handle the shovel.
JOEY MONTES // FOUNDER